Comments on HR Search Marketing: Does SEO Open the Flood Gates to Receiving Unquali...

Hi Nicole/Steve Odd self-interest angle for an ATS...

2009-06-02T08:39:50.063-06:00

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

The English language is so complicated until SEO w...

2009-06-01T14:41:17.830-06:00

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.

Hey Steven - Thanks for your thoughts. I absolutel...

2009-05-31T14:18:35.993-06:00

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.

Nicole -- I think that your inference was correct ...

2009-05-30T21:19:33.930-06:00

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.