I came across a news article this morning that really caught my eye. Usually I store good news stories away for the day I can bust out a corresponding blog post, but luckily I am cracked out on coffee and felt like throwing some information at the interwebz right now.

Disclaimer: I have been driving for 6 hours, (as I make my way up the coast to my new home in Seattle) so any words that are used in this post are a direct result from either
a) caffeine
b) lack of sleep
c) the continuous stream of happy ‘80s tunes I played as I drove
…or a collaboration of all three.

Anyway, lets jump back to it. So today I read how some companies are using SEO to gain an advantage when posting open jobs at their company. I of course started to salivate since this article combined two of my favorite things—online marketing & the job search. I started wondering how many of your companies have thought of this? Are any of your HR departments conspiring with the SEO ninjas in your company to push out a perfectly optimized job listing page?

Don’t hate me—but I’m gonna guess no.

So why bother? Well let me tell you one thing I know for sure—the real estate on job boards is highly competitive right now. You would think with so many people out of work, people would be willing to wander page after page of listings. Although that makes sense, it is actually much more likely that a person searches the first page of job listings and then bounces to another site. There are simply so many job boards out there, and so many of them have a niche focus that people really do have hundreds of “first page results” to check out.

Hence my original point—you gotta optimize people. In addition to making sure the PAGE of your job listings is well optimized, you may also want to consider optimizing the job listing itself. This includes:

The title: does it accurately describe the position while still be as SPECIFIC as possible.
The description: does it have as many bullet points and “buzz worthy” words as you can (while still sounding professional).
The numbers: do you have salary ranges? Years of experience? The date of the posting?
...make sure you have all of this accurately reflected in the post somewhere.

Basically it comes down to companies being more proactive when it comes to listing open positions at their company. SEO has always been a huge part of any online company's marketing strategy, but now we are seeing companies realize the growing importance of an optimized site as it relates to candidates finding their open jobs. Like I said…just beautiful. Two very pretty & fantastic things hanging out together—SEO & the job search…how well do your two connect?