Does SEO Open the Flood Gates to Receiving Unqualified Resumes?
This past Thursday I gave my first-ever webinar through Kennedy Information. I have to say, it was a blast and I can only hope it was valuable to those attending. There were some really great questions asked duing the interactive Q&A session, one in particuliar that peaked my interest.
I thought it might be beneficial to share the question along with my answer (an expanded version of it anyway) here.
The Question
An ATS provider had told them not to engage in SEO as it would open the flood gates to tons of unqualified resumes. The question asked was basically whether or not this was a truthful statement.
Before I share my thoughts on this, I have to tell you first that SEO is my absolute passion in life (A bigger dork, I could not be) I have dedicated the last 7 years to studying and working full-time in the industry. That said, it erks (is that a word?) me when people who may not entirely understand the field give out inaccurate information.
My first reaction was that they are more than likely unable to provide SEO therefore wanted to devalue the importance of it using the scare tactic of “tons of unqualified resumes” Nice - keep thinking about yourself and not what's in the best interest of the industry as a whole.
The Truth - As I see It (other opinions welcome)
You will never be able to completely eliminate unqualified candidates from applying to your jobs, it doesn’t matter what channel you're using to attract them.
SEO is about leveraging a new candidate traffic opportunity. There are millions of searches being conducted by candidate’s everyday on search engines, applying SEO best practices to your career site and job content will help you get the attention of these people. Will you receive some unqualified applicants? Of course, at the end of the day SEO is just a form of marketing not magic.
With SEO you choose what words and phrases you want to be found most relevant for. If you're hiring specifically for an experienced .net developer that must be a US citizen that’s what you optimize the job description for. Will non US citizens that are only entry level still apply? You bet.
Keyword Research & Job Description Copy is KEY
If you’re receiving more unqualified applicants than normal, the first thing I would do is evaluate whether or not your job descriptions are written in a way that attracts the RIGHT candidate as well as look at what words and phrases you’re targeting in your optimization efforts.
The more specific you can be with your optimization efforts, the better qualified candidate you are bound to attract.
Thoughts?
4 comments:
Nicole -- I think that your inference was correct that the ATS probably has horrible search engine optimization and rather than investing the time, energy, and money to fix the problem instead tried to turn their weakness into a strength by preying on naive clients. Shame on them. But let's also remember that SEO isn't about attracting the most people to your site. It is about attractive the most well targeted people to your site. If you're trying to hire engineers, it isn't helpful and actually is harmful to attract a lot of great retail sales people. They're probably nice folks but can't help you. That isn't SEO as the pages aren't optimized for the people who you want to attract.
It would be great to "out" this ATS and let them try to explain their statements. Transparency is a wonderful thing. If you don't want to do it on your blog, see if you can find a way to get the information to me and I'll gladly publish it on mine.
Hey Steven - Thanks for your thoughts. I absolutely agree with you.
The goal of SEO is qualified traffic not just traffic itself. If done correctly, SEO is a tool that can help you get the attention of a somewhat untapped candidate pool (those using search engines) but its certainly not foolproof.
The English language is so complicated until SEO will always identify the unqualified along with the qualified and in many instances bypass many qualified.
For example, consider these phrases.
.Client liaison,
.Primary customer contact,
.Routinely met with clients
.Customer Relationship Management
.CRM
They can all mean the same thing but which phrase would be picked-up by the search engine.
Another example
.Primary vendor contact,
.Managed procurement,
.Purchased inventory,
.Knowledge of supply chain
.Supplier Relationship Management
.SRM
Again which phrase would be picked-up? The person using vendor contact may be more qualified than the person using SRM.
Words are relative and may differ because of a person’s age, current working environment, decade of education or the desire of the writer to display their writing prowess when preparing their resume. This leaves many qualified job seekers unseen and puts some who may not exactly meet the qualifications in the forefront.
It would be better if companies could post jobs in a format that would allow applicants to check-off their areas of experience. Then describe what they did in three sentences or less, in addition to submitting their resume. That would allow applicants to immediately see where they may fall short and possibly end the application process. Also, the employer would be able to get a total score of matching attributes. If there were questions, the written explanations would help to clear them up, without the need to call in the applicant for an interview.
In short, the problem is we are are using 1950 style resume submissions and trying to pair it with today's technology. To use an HR expression, it's not a good fit.
Hi Nicole/Steve
Odd self-interest angle for an ATS vendor to talk dirt on SEO. Isn't the purpose of an ATS system to filter though abundant candidates and come up with a short-list of good matches?
My article on why there are so many ATS vendors has a video on how to create an ATS in 10 minutes...
http://www.staffingtalk.com/2009/02/why-there-are-so-many-ats-products-on.html
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