As the guys at I-COM have supported me over the years, I thought it only fair when they asked if I would give them a spot on recruitment views, I was more than happy. One because they specialise in recruitment and secondly they are from my home town!

Saying that, if you do want an article it has to give added value to recruiters rather than a sales pitch.

On that point there are many companies that still market the old way by cold calling, which is fine but you can make your life much easier and certainly gain more opportunities by following some of the points below:

The Benefits of Online Marketing for Recruitment Agencies

Imagine if you could target individual people directly at the exact point they are looking for your services? That is what you can do online. A Department of Work and Pensions report shows that over 80% of job seekers now use the Internet for at least part of their job search.

So it comes as no surprise that e-recruiting has become a major part of most recruitment agencies’ methods for attracting job candidates and registrants.

Online Marketing should be seen as a channel where your recruitment business can:

1. Advertise your jobs effectively and with low costs
2. Build healthy relationships with possible job candidates
3. Build  healthy relationship with employers

So what can your business do to improve its position in the online world? There are a few targeted, and very different, methods for positioning your recruitment service online which are highlighted below.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Very few people who use search engines look beyond the first one or two pages of results. If your website or job listing is not returned within those two pages, preferably on the first page, your competition is beating you.

This is the one that requires a little more investment and is a long term venture, but one where the potential rewards are endless. SEO is the process of raising a website’s rankings within the search engines and most importantly within Google, which commands a market share of around 90%.

One of the main activities of SEO is structuring and editing the website to make it friendlier to the search engines. By doing this, you can target a wide audience – ideally all of the job types for which your company recruits.

For example, if you are a national recruitment company, then you can target job seekers by the following:

• By area (e.g. North-West)
• By County (e.g. Lancashire)
• By City/Area (e.g. Manchester)
• By Town (e.g. Didsbury, Stockport)
• By Profession (e.g. Construction, Marketing)
• By Job Title (e.g. account manager, builder)

You can also target by a mixture, for example City + Profession. As you can see, there is huge scope to reach an as-yet untapped audience. It will take time to target all of these areas, but of the list above demonstrates the potential scope of a long-term SEO campaign.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Whereas an SEO campaign is a long-term investment, PPC brings about a more immediate return. You bid for advertising space on Google for search terms, and then pay for each click through to your website.

This of course brings you immediate visitors and, if targeted at the correct search terms, would hopefully generate immediate conversions. This is a very good short term measure to bring in candidates and should be used alongside an ongoing SEO campaign while visibility within the non-paid search results is being built up.

Social Media/Networking

Engaging DIRECTLY with your customers through social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is a great way of reaching a new audience. Unlike SEO and PPC, there is a chance that you will reach people through these methods when they are not actively looking for a job, but are just browsing Twitter.

If you use a good mix of all these methods, you will be promoting your brand to a broad audience who are all searching differently for the same thing – a new job that YOU can help them to find.

Web Design and Development

While this is of course not actually Online Marketing, it is essential that an experienced web designer looks at your website to ensure the user experience is correct. If it isn’t, then you might not get those applications or CV uploads.

Finding an Online Marketing Company

Of course, if you do not find the right people to carry out this work for you, it could at best be ineffective and at worst could be damaging to your company’s reputation and website. Ensure you find a company with experience in the sector, like I-COM in Manchester. We have worked on multiple campaigns in this field and have all of the expertise you need to help you promote your website to its target audience and help turn that target audience into customers. Give a member of the I-COM online marketing team a call on 0844 704 6830 for a chat.