November Minnesota Recrutiers (un)Conference Wrap Up

Our Fall/Winter Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference was held last Friday (November 21st) at Best Buy. We had our best turn out yet, a whopping 240 attendees. I was surprised to learn that a good 80% of those in attendance were first-timers.

Thanks to the generous Minnesota recruiting community, we were able to collect 300 lbs of food for our community outreach partner Second Harvest Heartland. Sadly, each day thousands of Minnesotans go hungry and the numbers are growing. Hunger affects the young, the old, women and men from all ethnic backgrounds. The faces of hunger do not look that different from our own families. Together we can make a difference, consider making a cash donation today.

Event Presentations:

First up – A social media panel of experts that included Josh Kahn of Best Buy, Erica Steffenson of Ecolab, Katie Carty Tierney of nGenera Corporation and Tavis Hudson of technical Resources Inc.

The panel talked about how they source and recruit candidates using social media platforms like Twitter - follow me here. They touched on how you would go about establishing a recruiter and employer brand, what their companies think of social media and pitfalls to watch out for.

In response to a question about how much time is spent on Social Media, Katie replied with “constant partial attention.” AWESOME! (Thanks for the quote Paul)

Confused About Twitter? No Worries

I know from having a few conversations about Twitter during the networking session that there were some people that were still a bit confused with Twitter and really wanted more information on how they could get started. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Bryan Starbuck, CEO of Talent Spring created a presentation that is sure to answer a lot of questions. Check it out….



Twitter for Recruiting (Hiring) from Bryan Starbuck on Vimeo.

Second up - Was a very interactive session called "Deep Structure Recruiting" by Allan Larson of Ovation, LLC

This session focused on two concepts that would take your candidate and hiring manager consulting skills to the next level. Attendees learned how to better work within the unique styles of their managers and candidates as well as how to manage their own unique strengths and blind spots.

Sadly, I missed most of Allan's presentation because I was pacing outside the door doing the breathing and hand clenching exercises I was taught to do before presentations. I am new to presenting and am up next. 240 people is pretty intimidating.

Third up - Was my presentation on the basics of SEO and SEM and how it is applied to recruiting. My goal was to educate people on how they could take advantage of search as a talent opportunity without hiring an experts.

You can view my presentation below.



Uploaded on authorSTREAM by NicoleBodem


All in all I think it was our most successfully event to date. I am honored to be a part of such a great community of people.

Jobs Feeds - The Secret to Search Engine Visibility

Did you know that the job boards get a good portion of their traffic from search engines like Google? In fact, look at the statistics The Chad found below:

Whats preventing your career site from taking advantage of some of this traffic? Simply put, it's the drop down menu.
























Search engines cannot select from drop down menus, therefore all of the job content behind drop down menus is invisible to search engines and therefore invisible to potential job seekers.



Learn The Secret to Visibility


The secret is search engine visibility is a job feed. Ask your ATS provider for a feed of your jobs. Put those feeds on a page of your career site that is already indexed by the search engines, just like Target did (below)














Search engines will come by and follow your job feed links, reading all of the job content within it.


























Once search engines read or index your job content, they will make it available in their index for potential job seekers to find.















Granted, job candidates are not searching for "Executive Team Leader Assets Protection jobs San Jose" but this is where optimizing for the right job titles comes into play. It really just shows you how powerful something as simple as a job feed can be.