How to Optimize Your Online Job Descriptions

Posted April 30, 2014

What’s your number one priority when writing and posting a job description? Obviously, you want qualified, intelligent applicants to respond to it. And these days, in order to attract the right candidates, you have to put more thought and effort into the words you’re putting on the screen.

You’ve heard of SEO – search engine optimization – and maybe that sounds intimidating or too technical. But it’s just a new way of thinking about what you want your job postings to do.

Your online job descriptions should fulfill three functions:

• Give information about the specifics of the job
• Provide insight into your company’s culture and employment brand
• Build links and drive job seekers to your site or job postings

Using SEO properly will help you increase your company’s search engine page ranking, and reach a very specific audience of job seekers. What do you need to do?

1. Think Carefully about Keywords. You want the right people to look at your posting, and you want to let them know where you are. Use terminology or buzzwords that are important for this person to know, commonly used titles for your position and the city where your job opening is located. If you’re unsure about how to do this, check out the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

2. Dress It Up. Identify your most important keywords and use bold face or a larger text size to highlight their importance. Search engines will score this text higher. And use video, which attracts search engines as well as job seekers. Just a few minutes about your company culture or the area where you’re located can intrigue a good applicant and keep them on your site longer.

3. Create a Careers Landing Page. You don’t want to worry about keeping your job postings current on external job boards, and even on your own board, if they look like they’re old, they might not attract good candidates. But if you have specific positions that are hard to fill or always open, you can drive job seekers to a landing page through optimized postings that include your keywords making them easily found by web crawlers and job seekers alike.
4. Use a Custom URL. As an additional way to attract job seekers to your landing page, emphasize the importance of certain keywords, customize the web address for your postings to include the city and job title or common keyword. For example: wwww.company.com/careers/quality-inspector-atlanta-georgia-atl.

Optimizing your online job postings with SEO takes some effort and probably some trial and error at first. But if the results drive qualified candidates instead of hundreds of unqualified candidates to your job postings, it will make the screening and interview process less time-consuming and much easier.

Any questions? Or would you rather have someone else run your job searches or find great candidates for you? If you are looking for southern recruiting agencies, contact our team today.