I recently received a question from a Client on what makes a strong posting for a variety of sites - including page rankings on job boards, search engines, and various job aggregator sites.  While there are many factors, the biggest issue we’ve encountered is postings are not always written in the format a candidate may search for them.  When posting your next position online, keep the following tips in mind:

• The job title is critical.  Think of how candidates may search job sites or search engines for positions.  A majority of job seekers would likely not search a job site or search engine for a "Member Service Representative II".  Refer to the title as your target market would refer to it.  More keywords can help.
• As with the first point, avoid using too much internal language that is irrelevant to the average candidate.
• Be careful with acronyms.  We always recommend including them, but also expanding on them.  Job seekers search with a variety of terms - be sure to include them.  If you are recruiting for a CFO, be sure to include the term Chief Financial Officer in your posting too.  You might lose prospects if you do not include both.
• Use wise headers.  Again, depending on your ATS you may have flexibility or control.  Most job sites today include the title and location in the page header for you.
• Use keywords in multiple ways throughout your posting.  As an example, if you are recruiting for a role and potential prospects might have retail, customer service, call center, or other experiences, include these terms.
• Research.  Spend a few minutes looking at various sites to see how others - and competitors are advertising their opportunities.
• While this is obvious, your posting is should "sell" your organization and opportunity.  If you are simply cutting and pasting the job description into the posting your results will be impacted! Especially with more passive candidates as job descritions are typically written for internal purposes, not sales documents.

Spending a few extra minutes up front before posting positions on top job sites is worthwile and should be worth the return in additional exposure to prospects or their referrals you may be missing out on.

The CUhire blog post every Wednesday is about delivering recruiting news and hot topics from other sites, newsletters and blogs.  Some great information caught my attention recently!

First, for Recruiting, Research and Sourcing professionals (if you’re not you can still learn something too) I came across a post this morning that has some valuable search techniques – from a site called GoogleGuide.

And, with all of the talk about social media and networking be sure to check out "Social Recruiting:  Corporate Adoption of Social Media for Recruiting and Retention".

If you consider competitive intelligence important in researching organizations and passive candidates, LinkedIn released some new features on their site that have a tremendous amount of value for a variety of users.  Check out the video for an overview.  Of course, if you haven’t had the chance to join the CUhire Credit Union professionals group on LinkedIn, check it out and join.

There is a lot of conversation about the competitive labor market, and the importance of creating an engaging experience for candidates.  As noted in a recent CUhire Press Release, one quick, easy and FREE way to do this is through the partnership CUhire created with Standout Jobs.

With the Reception service from Standout Jobs, you are able to give candidates the information and interactivity they have come to expect.  Key benefits to the Reception service include:

• Creating a career site to showcase your culture and team
• Managing the hiring process more efficiently
• Marketing and tracking jobs
• Building on-going relationships and finding great talent

To showcase the Reception product, CUhire created the following Credit Union Jobs page to reinforce the overall ease of use and effectiveness.  Besides the fact the product is FREE through the partnership, you do not need to have IT expertise to get your own site up and running…  Ours took about 20 minutes, take a look here:

We’d like to challenge you to create a more engaging and interactive career site for your candidates! The first Credit Union to create their site through Standout Jobs will receive a free "platinum" job posting on CUhire’s Credit Union job board.  Just post a comment on this blog post once it is completed.

A FREE job site, FREE job posting, and a more engaging experience for your candidates.  There is no catch, it’s a win-win.

The CUhire blog post for Wednesdays is about delivering recruiting news and hot topics from other sites and blogs. 

This week I came across a great blog post from Jobs in Pods called "2 things every corporate recruiter should see and hear about recruiting with social media".  The videos are very telling.

Next, a post about job boards from John Sumser.  I have appreciation for John’s last comment about the importance of sites building alliances and partnerships across the web.  This is true for us too, and is a competitive advantage.  When you post a job CUhire’s Credit Union Jobs site you are leveraging our technology and partnerships with a growing network of general and niche job boards (including Monster.com), blogs, user home pages, professional networking, and association sites.  We target both passive and active candidates by also searching and marketing to a variety of associations, databases, and professional networking sites to drive targeted candidate traffic to your posting.

I’ll close out this post with some food for thought on a post I came across today on filling positions vacated by baby boomer retirements.

LinkedIn, now boasting over 20 million users and 500 employers, announced the launch of a new premium account designed specifically for Recruiters this week.

LinkedIn Recruiter offers premium features and services designed to fit individual corporate staffing departments’ needs. The new Recruiter account is geared to enhance both active and passive sourcing with:

• New productivity and team collaboration tools
• Powerful new search capabilities
• A new user interface for efficient recruiting workflow
• Bundled InMails and job postings

Click here to see more information on the LinkedIn Recruiter account.

If you have not had a chance to sign up for the Free Credit Union LinkedIn Group, click here for more information – and join a leading networking group for Credit Unions and Human Resources professionals.