Minnesota Recruiters Event - Be Passionate, Be Social, Be Searchable

After a 12 month absence from the MN recruiter’s events due to traveling, a new job and life in general I was glad to get back into the swing of things. It was nice to catch up with the regulars and even nicer to meet some of the new folks.

The Minnesota Recruiter’s events always draw some amazing speakers who are willing to share what they know selflessly. The lineup included:

• Amy Langer, Co-founder of Salo, Oberon and NumberWorks

• Jim Durbin, Managing Principal of Social Media Talent

• Craig Fisher, VP of Sales for AJAX Social Media & Managing Principal of Social Media Talent

The recurring theme was summed up perfectly by David Gee of staffing talk “Be passionate, social and searchable”

About the Presentations

• Amy’s presentation inspired the audience and left them thinking about their contribution to the organizations they work for in a slightly different way. Her main message was to do what you love, because then it doesn’t feel like work.

• Jim Durbin described recruiters as being naturally “social rockstars”. He talked about the next wave in social being about building the experience across all company touch points and how recruiters can help lead the way as centers of excellence.

• As a recruitment SEO geek, it was Craig Fishers presentation on LinkedIn Profile optimization that I was most excited to hear. I was pretty familiar with the content he covered as I follow his blog regularly. Amongst other things, he talked about the behavioral science behind profile pictures. For women, his advice was to have a picture where you are smiling and looking at the camera and that everyone should keep it consistent with their story and field they work in. (IE: creative people might want a photo that’s a bit more creative)
  
  When he started to talk about SEO, I actually put my blackberry down (which is normally super glued to my hand) Craig gave the audience some good advice (that I agree with) around leveraging anchor text in links and adding keywords, especially location based keywords to your profile. But, he did mention one tip that I have a difference in opinion on.

Slideshare Presentations on Your LinkedIn Profile will NOT help with SEO

Craig’s advice was to create a keyword rich job description in Slideshare and said that once displayed the keywords used in Slideshare will help your LinkedIn Profile Ranking.

My Argument

Granted services like Slideshare allow you to add more depth and dimension to your LinkedIn Presence and enable a person to present additional content that demonstrates value but it will not increase the ranking of your profile within the search engines or within LinkedIn for that matter.

The algorithms that search engines and platforms like LinkedIn use to determine relevancy can only read text. Flash, Images and text embedded within images (if not HTML) are invisible to them. Meaning any keywords embedded inside images or flash elements are invisible and therefore can’t help with building relevancy or ranking.

I’m going to use Craig’s LinkedIn Profile – because it’s a great example of an SEO-optimized profile and because I don’t have the Slideshare application on my LinkedIn page.

The Slideshare thumbnails on the main page are actually images. Once you click on one of the images you are taken to a different page then the main profile page. A quick view of the source code on that page indicates that the embedded Slideshare presentation is Flash based.

Should You Leverage Slideshare?

Absolutely!! But don’t count on the keywords embedded within Slideshare helping your profile rank in search engines or the LinkedIn platform itself.

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Thanks to Paul DeBettignies for putting on another amazing event and to the 2011 event sponsors, Staffing Talk, Oberon and Monster for helping to make them possible.