Online Recruiting and Applicant Tracking

Ideas for Human Resource Metrics for Small Organizations

2009-03-11T09:52:00.003-06:00

By Steven J Smith, PHR

Having worked with a few small organizations in the past (8-500 employees), the one thing that I have learned over the years is that CEOs for small companies are very focused on one thing: Revenue. As a result, oftentimes the Human Resource Department is seen more as a cost center or an expense to the organization instead of as a strategic partner to help contribute to the bottom-line. This is why understanding what metrics to measure and what to present to your boss is vital to the success of the impact your department can have on the company and truly proving the value of what you are doing for the company. This is even more critical right now where a lot of companies are cutting back, but still have high expectations for your department.

Working with iApplicants and communicating with small business HR departments every day, one of the most common questions that I get revolves around is that of HR metrics and what to track. This question is brought up most often when I discuss how we provide different customized reports for each organization so that they can pull these reports up automatically and track what is most important to them. Some of these reports we already offer because they are the most common and are currently used in our software. Since they are also important metrics, I want to discuss these briefly first and then address other reports that you may want to make a part of your organization:

Ad Source Reports: This tracks how applicants have heard about your organization. This data can be critical, especially if you have recently used a new source of advertising and you want to see if this produced the results you were looking for. Another example is that of a new ERP (Employee Referral Program) and you want to see if this has increased the amount of hires you are getting from employees.
HR Data Reports: This report covers 4 main areas: Candidates Interviewed; Candidates Hired; Candidates Terminated; and those who are eligible for rehire. These are great metrics to look at.
EEOC Reports: I think this may speak for itself as it allows you to run a report for a period of time, a particular position, and hired or non-hired individuals. This allows you to show in “good faith” that you are compliant with current laws surrounding these topics of diversity. This will also allow you to see that if you notice a lack of diversity in this process, you may want to go to that diversity career fair or place that ad in a particular paper to attract a more diverse pool of candidates just to be safe.
Traffic Reports: This is unique to iApplicants than any other applicant tracking software that I have seen. We assign a username and password for you through Google analytics that allows you to see the traffic reports for visits to your careers website, as well as where people are coming from and the top 5 keywords candidates are typing in the search engines to find your open jobs.
Screening Questions Reports: This is the last report available in our software that allows you to ask key questions up front about each one of your positions and becomes a powerful screening tool so that as candidates apply, you can sift through them quickly and decide whether or not you want to consider them in the interview process from the get go, saving you a lot of time

So before I go into the other list of metrics that smaller firms should consider using, keep in mind that not all of these metrics will apply to your organization. The best thing to do is think about how your organization works and decide what metrics would work best to be that strategic partner you are looking to be for your boss. Or better yet, ask your boss or CFO directly what metrics are important to him/her and implement those in your process.

Word of Caution

The biggest mistake I have made in my career when it comes to metrics was creating so many metrics that it was not feasible to maintain some of them, or use them as relevant data to help in making correct decisions moving forward. The key here is to make sure that the metrics you decide to use are those that will truly have a business impact on your organization, otherwise it will be a waste of your time to track the data and run the reports. I found that the best person to work with in this matter is the CFO, or Controller (since they are involved in the finances of the company). They will know better than anyone the impact your metrics will have on the bottom line, and having them on your side will eliminate roadblocks in the future with your boss.

My only other word of caution is that some of these metrics you will not want integrated in your iApplicants software. Not because they are not relevant, but because the data may not be there since some of these metrics only apply to your company after folks are hired. iApplicants specifically focuses on the hiring process (or recruiting process), so the metrics that pertain to hiring/recruiting would best be utilized with our software. So I have separated these metrics into main categories to help in understanding where these metrics would work best.

List of Human Resource Metrics

Productivity/Employee Relations

This is mostly based on employee surveys. One of the biggest mistakes most small companies face with surveys is to make a biased survey based on what they want to hear (by wording the question a certain way, etc) rather than what they really need to hear from their employees. So do not attempt any employee surveys unless you are ready to do two specific things:

Be open to ALL feedback, regardless of how painful it might be.
Provide results and discuss issues that were prevalent to the majority of employees (they want to hear the results, and you don’t have to show ALL the results, just the ones most important to them as a whole).

You can measure the percentage of employees who look forward to coming to work, relationships with managers, and so forth. Since managers should be rewarded for high productivity and high employment engagement scores, these statistics are helpful to reveal unproductive departments and/or managers to help you determine where problems exist. You can look at the turnover compared to employees input on certain managers to see if there is a correlation (especially if turnover is high and reviews are bad for the same manager). Also performance appraisals for employees compared to last year is good to see if employees are growing within the organization as well as their overall satisfaction with their appraisals. They can also measure the effort from HR and managers to properly train and manage employees to achieve the desired results.

For the CFO, a statistic such as the improvement in dollars spent on people costs for every dollar of revenue or profit generated (compare to years past) is very important. So from an HR standpoint, the amount of money spent in your department on ads, hiring, interviewing, etc for every dollar generated. Instead of just focusing on costs, focus on statistics like this that are relevant to the bottom line.

Recruiting/Retention

At the most recent Crossroads Conference last September for the Salt Lake chapter of SHRM, we had a panel of CEOs from various companies speak. They mentioned that one of the top 5 things that they expect from HR is statistics on recruiting and hiring. Here are a few bullet points of the additional metrics CEOs expect to see:

Manager satisfaction with new hires (survey again compared to years past).
Turnover rate of new hires within the first year (which I would break down into 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, 9 months and 1 year). You can do an overall employee turnover too, but for small companies I found that not only was it a waste of time, but the reasons people left at that point were not as relevant as reasons in the first year, so I stopped measuring beyond one year).
Average performance measures on new hires compared to last year.
Time-filled (in other words, the time the position became vacant to the time it was filled, especially for key roles).
Percentage of diversity in your hiring.
The dollar impact on bad hire decisions.
Offers made compared to offers accepted.

This will lead to the need for retention measures as well:

Performance turnover: how often turnover is related to performance on the job (in other words you let them go because they under-perform).
Exit Surveys: often called preventable or avoidable turnover where you find out why folks leave and if any of those things mentioned could have been prevented.
Dollar impact of employee turnover in key positions, or in departments with high turnover (such as the sales department) because there are costs to retrain, etc. Keep in mind that typically lower performers should receive less weight for their reasons for leaving than higher performers.
Diversity turnover.
Manager satisfaction with HR involvement (or lack thereof) in training and retention efforts, as well as the impact that this has on productivity. I had really good relationships with managers, so sometimes these measurements contained bias, so you need to make sure the questions you ask deal specifically with how the training, etc. directly affected the productivity of that particular department or unit.

Benefits/Compensation

Depending on the size of your organization you may or may not have benefits in place. In my experience, we had some candidates not accept an offer based on benefits. You need to look at those areas as well as the overall feel of how employees view the benefits and compensation. By the same token, we had people eventually leave for benefit or compensation reasons, so understanding the employee overall satisfaction is very helpful. We found that once we discovered the biggest issues, our service providers in competition with others we were looking at would create better plans for us. One very beneficial measure is the cost of compensation and benefits that it took to generate one dollar of revenue (again, compare to years past).

Training and Development

Development and growth are important for employee retention. It is also important to understand the type of development employees and managers are in order for these measurements to be effective. These are again based on surveys, which would include the new hires in their training and development so you can pinpoint key areas where there may be a need for improvement. This can also have an impact on employee referrals for open positions. If an employee loves their work and the potential for growth and development, they are very likely to share open job opportunities with a friend.

The final metric to look at is the percentage of goals that were completed (met or exceeded) for the year. Since these usually revolve around the training and development, as well as advertising and general recruiting efforts, these would vary by company. But they are a great way to set goals, quantify and prioritize specific goals and get them approved by Senior Management to be reported on at the end of the year.

More about Steven

Introducing our Newest Blog Contributor - Steven J Smith, PHR

2009-03-11T09:49:00.001-06:00

Steve has over 5 years experience within the Human Resource and Recruiting professions for mid-sized organizations. His contributions have marked a distinct and significant improvement in the acquisition of top tier personnel that have made an unmistakable contribution to the growth and strategic development for the organizations for which he has worked. In his current role with iApplicants, his goal is to help HR departments simplify their hiring process by providing better reporting and tracking capabilities. He feels very strongly that HR should be a strategic partner with the executive team, and by providing an applicant tracking software that is user-friendly and customizable, clients can save time, money, and have the ability to better show the value of their department. Steve holds a B.S degree in Finance from Brigham Young University and is PHR certified.

Improving Operations and Bottom Line of a Private Security Firm

2009-01-28T22:46:00.002-07:00

The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers this description of the security guard’s job: “Guards, who are also called security officers, patrol and inspect property to protect against fire, theft, vandalism, terrorism, and illegal activity. These workers protect their
employer’s investment, enforce laws on the property, and deter criminal activity or other problems. They use radio and telephone communications to call for assistance from police, fire, or emergency medical services as the situation dictates.” The field is described by one worker as “a lot like being a pilot—hours and hours of working boredom, punctuated by infrequent moments of sheer terror.”

As a successful provider of private security guards, RAMS Specialized Security Service, Inc has become an industry leader, respected by peers and clients, and is experiencing steady growth. In an industry plagued by turnover estimated to average as high as 300% per year (J.R. Roberts, Security Strategies), relatively low wages (national average is less than $12/hour), 24-hour work schedules, and the real possibility of danger, they have managed to build a very stable workforce , with an annual turnover percentage of only 22%! Furthermore, they have avoided the headline producing missteps of some of their competition.

Consider these headlines, generated last year by other security companies:

“Schoolteacher robbed and beaten at mall while security guards meet in food court!”
“Guard smokes crack, burns factory to ground!”
“Two security guards face off in shoot-out—14 shots, no one injured!”

Given that this company has avoided the negatives, keeps their clients, and has an enviably low turnover in their ranks, it might be easy for the owner to rest on her laurels, happy just to maintain a comfortable and profitable position. On the other hand, that kind of thinking is not what put her in this good situation, and she is highly motivated to continuously improve.

At the end of 2003, the owner and managers of this company calculated, even with their low rate of 22%, turnover cost the company nearly $80,000 over the course of the year! They decided to attack this problem with the Step One Survey II TM pre-screener, reasoning it would not only impact turnover, but further lower their risk of hiring someone who might produce one of those ugly headlines. Through the 2004 calendar year, the SOS2 was used to prescreen applicants for security guard positions, and the interview guide was used in the pre-hire interviews.

The results were striking: Even with the very low comparative rate of 22% in 2003, the screening and interview process further reduced turnover, to only 17% in 2004. This reduction of 22% in the base rate of turnover produced a savings of over $14,000 with
an investment of less than $2,000—a return on investment of $7 for each $1 spent!

The moral of the story is obvious: Even when you’re small, even when you’re doing a lot of things right, there’s money to be saved by doing them better! What’s more, this owner does not lose much sleep in asking the question J.R. Roberts has adopted as a company
motto: “Quis Custodiat Ipso Custodes?”—Who will guard the guards?

iApplicants is proud to be integrated with the Step One Survey II TM. Over 40% of our clients currently use the SOS2 to help reduce their turnover and improve the quality of their interviews. Even if you do not use iApplicants, we can still help you effectively use the Step One Survey II TM as part of your hiring process.

If you would like to see the SOS2 in action, contact iApplicants today and request a FREE TRIAL of the Step One Survey II by calling 888-633-9269.

More about John

How to Search Engine Optimize Job Listings

2008-04-14T16:51:00.005-06:00

The goal of this post is to help our clients understand how to create job postings on their iApplicants™ careers site that will be “optimized” or rank well in the search engines for specific keyword phrases. These same techniques are valuable for posting jobs to online job boards as well since many of them use some type of search technology for showing job postings to potential job seekers.

NOTE: The ideas discussed below will work if you have your own careers page that was built by your internal web team or with some other ATS system vendor as long as the careers site itself was built to be search engine friendly. In my experience, few ATS careers sites are built in a way to allow the search engines to properly index them, and so using proper keyword targeting in your job listings will do little to overcome those shortcomings. If you would like us to take a look at your current careers site or ATS and let you know if it will work, just drop us a note.

There are two main parts to increasing the number of qualified applicants you receive for a job. First, get as many qualified applicants as possible to view your job ad and second, make sure your ad gets those applicants exited about applying. The following information will target how to improve both of these areas.

Profile the Job

Generally, most employers use job board ads and descriptions for each of their positions, often created long in the past. When the job comes open, they simply pull them out and dust them off to use again. I guess this process works great if you like the results that you have been getting, but if you are looking to improve the quality and quantity of applicants you receive, it might be time to rework the ad and description.

When you pull out the ad and description you used last time, it is important to review it and make sure it is still valid. You might be able to adjust it to ensure you are attracting the most qualified applicants. One way to do this would be to review the Ad with the manager over the position, or more importantly talk to the actual top performers currently doing the job. Find out what attracted them to the company and that specific position. Even more important, why do they like the job now that they have been doing it for a while. I’m not just talking about why they like being a programmer or machinist, but why do they enjoy doing it for your company. Is there something about your company culture, environment, pay, benefits, etc. that is especially appealing to them and keeps them around?

Research the Keywords to Target

Now that you have a clear idea of what the ad and description needs to say, we need to ensure that the vocabulary we use produces the best results. Often, companies are stuck in their own vocabulary. They use internal terminology for posting jobs on their careers site or to the job board, such as “Programmer – Level 2”. This might make perfect sense to the HR person, as that is the actual title of the job, but it means absolutely nothing to the job seeker. Even more important, the job may not even show up on the searches being used by your dream applicants. Not many job seekers are looking specifically for a “level 2 programmer job”, so it’s probably not a phrase they will perform a search on. With the switch from newspaper ads to job board and search engines, the way job seekers look for positions is very different than it was, even five years ago. It isn’t just that they are now sitting in front of a computer, but instead of browsing or skimming over every ad in the paper, they are now running searches to allow them to jump to a short list of jobs that fit their criteria. This means that it is extremely important that you and your potential applicants use the same words to describe your job in the search. So, we need to do some research to see what keywords are being frequently searched. Find a keyword research tool, such as the one below:

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Using this tool, you can type in a word that pertains to the job and see how many people are searching for that word or keyword phrases that include that word. This is valuable information to know when posting a job. Here is an example: We have a client who is hiring a CNA. They post a position with the job title “CNA”. Nice, short, and sweet, and typically costs less when placing a newsprint ad. The problem is that many potential job seekers aren’t searching for “CNA” online. If we go and look at what is being searched for, we see that there are 399 people a day searching for “CNA” but another 136 people a day who are searching for “Certified Nursing Assistant” that would never find our job. So, we would want to include both listings. There are even more people who are searching for “Nursing Jobs”. Sure, not all of them fit this specific position, but it is also a good phrase to target. Out of this research we want to come up with 2 or 3 phrases to target with the ad. Don’t go crazy here and try to target 10 different phrases with one ad, it simply won’t work.

Write the Job Title & Description with Keywords in Mind

So, we are now armed with our previous posting, information from our top employees about why they like the job, and keyword information about what phrases are being search for the most. We can now use this to write an excellent job title, job description (for the careers site), and job ad (for the job board). We want to be sure that the title and description of the ad use our keyword phrases, but it still has to sound right to a normal person and get them excited about applying for the job.

The job title should be very focused on the keywords we are targeting, so using the example from above, we will change the job title of “CNA” to “CNA – Certified Nursing Assistant – Nurse Job”. If you want one shorter, maybe “CNA Certified Nursing Assistant Job”. You normally wouldn’t think to include the word job in your title, but since that is a main keyword for someone searching Google for the page, it can’t hurt to include it.

The job description is a bit tricky. You need to write an ad that will be appealing to your job seekers and call them to action (apply for the job), and at the same time be sure to use your target keyword phrases. We don’t just want to focus on the minimum requirements for applicants and what the job requires, but also talk about why this job is so great and why they will love it. Many times we write the ad or job description in a way to tell the applicants what they must have to apply, and to try to get unqualified applicants to not apply. Although this is a start, we need to remember that we are trying to sell this job to the job seeker, especially in a tight labor pool. We no longer live in a world where ads have to be controlled by the number of lines, bold typeface or boxes around it to control advertising costs. Many job boards today are no charge, and virtually none charge by the length of the ad.

The longer the description the better, since search engines love websites with text on them, just make sure you aren’t mentioning the same keyword phrase more than 3% of the time, so if your description is 200 words, don’t mention the phrase more then 5 or 6 times. (Note: if you need to know how many words the description is, in MS Word just click on “tools” and “word count”.)

The following is an example of a typical ad you might see in the local newspaper, or online:

Title: Staff Accountant
Job Description: CPA required, competitive salary and benefits, good working environment. Send resume to hr@yourcompany.com.

Now, to dress up that ad, to pique the job seekers’ interest, and make the search engines love it… consider the following job ad:

Title: Staff Accountant – CPA - Accounting Job
Job Description:We’re gonna miss Charlie, our best staff accountant/CPA! Charlie worked as a staff accountant for us for the past 6 years, and has just opened his own accounting practice in Maui. He used our accounting firm’s excellent continuing education program, supportive environment, competitive salary and benefits, and great co-workers to build his expertise, bank account, and family, and we wish him well—but we need to find his replacement, who will be a CPA with a sense of humor, a drive to improve, and a desire to work in one of the world’s best accounting settings. If you can replace Charlie, click on the link below to begin your new career.

Text Links to your Job Listing Page

If you want to get really crazy, you can increase the rankings of your job listing page by creating text links pointing to that job listing on your company website, blog, or on the online job boards that you post to. If you have a job ad that includes the keyword phrase nursing job, then replace that text on the job board listing with <a href = “[job url]”>nursing job</a>. Be sure to replace the [job URL] with the actual URL where your job description is on your iApplicants™ careers site including the http://. This same type of link could be used on your company blog or website. Blogs are a great, overlooked recruiting tool. Many of the people reading your company blog may be potential job seekers. Just make sure that you use the same html link setup as above to boost your rankings. You might also research some local bloggers whose subject matter is similar to the job opening you have and submit the job posting to them and ask them to blog about it. Some of your employees might have their own blogs and could do this for you as well. Our goal for these types of posts is to not only get potential job seekers to read about the job and visit our careers site, but also for the search engines to see the link to our job listing with the targeted keyword phrases in order to boost our rankings.

Measure your Results

As the old saying goes, and I’m sure this won’t be the last time I say it, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”. Now that you have made these changes, it is important to use the source reports and Google Analytics from your iApplicants™ careers site to compare the number of job seekers who visited the job description, applied to the job, and were interviewed for the position. You don’t want to rely on your gut to know if your changes are working, be sure to look at the real data on what is actually happening. .

Ryan Kohler, CEO

More about Ryan

Catching the Best Candidates in your Applicant Pool

2008-04-09T23:54:00.003-06:00

When you go out in the marketplace to find a new employee, you are very much in the role of a tournament fisherman! You and all the other employers seeking a new recruit, standing around the shores of the same pond, all wishing you could catch a world-record fish…but, unfortunately, that fish does not live in this pond!

Your task, then, becomes one of catching the very best fish you can, not catching the little ones that you’ll eventually throw back, and certainly trying not to catch any bottom-feeding carp.

How, then, are we employers to compete? Like tournament fishermen, we are likely to do much better if we know something about the fish available in our pond! Anglers use fish finders to help see through the muddy water. How many big ones are available? How many little ones will hit our bait first? How many carp? Where do the best ones swim--on top, or on the bottom? Many employers don’t have a very good picture of the answers to these important questions, and are forced to blindly throw their bait out in the form of shotgun advertising, hoping for the best.

Tournament anglers invest a lot of money in their tools-rods, reels, and lures designed to maximize their catch of the best fish and minimize the time they waste on the others. As employers, we will have the best return on our investment if we have good tools, helping maximize our catch.

OK, enough of the fishing analogy-you get the idea. In learning about the characteristics of our applicant population, and in targeting the most desirable among them to transform into good employees, we need a competitive fisherman’s mindset, and tools that will allow us to measure the population and select the best from them. That tool, for many successful companies, is a quality pre-employment assessment.

Pre-employment assessments have been in use for many, many years, and some of them are referred to as “honesty-integrity tests.” As with most products that have stayed on the market for 50+ years, the types and formats have evolved into a bewildering array of choices, some very good, some nearly worthless, or even illegal. How can you recognize a measure that is likely to be able to help, and also be sure it’s not going to cause you trouble?

You can look for several things that tend to identify a good pre-employment screening assessment:

It will have a legal opinion (in writing) available to you on request.
It will have a technical manual, also available on request, which will document the reliability, validity, and non-discriminatory characteristics of the instrument, base on valid scientific method.
It will include a distortion, or “faking” score, to alert you to invalid results.
It will measure more than one important dimension of employee characteristics. (For example, common measurements including honesty, integrity, work ethic, reliability, and probability of substance abuse.)
It will provide an interview guide, to enrich your interview while steering you clear of forbidden waters.
It will provide clear, easy-to-read results which need little interpretation, and it will provide them quickly and easily.
The system will include built-in,easy-to-use statistical tools that do not cost you extra money to use.

Once you have found a measure that meets those standards, you are prepared to ask for two more things:

Examples of case studies, showing the use of the measure in real work settings, the effects, and a cost-benefit analysis.
A chance to speak with other employers who are currently using the measure.

Having found your measure, and having decided to use it, what should you expect from your new “fishing tools”? Within a short time, you should begin to see a clearer picture of your applicant pool, both their shortcomings and their strengths. You should be able to, in a relatively short time, see and document improvements in turnover rate, tardiness, attendance, shrinkage, and on-the-job injuries.

As our companies, jobs, settings, and cultures vary so will results of using a pre-employment screening measure. In a sample of five case studies however across five very different employment settings, the average cost-benefit ratio was over 20:1.

Integrating a good pre-employment assessment with job-specific screening questions is a very efficient way to focus on finalists who are likely to be good employees, and who can do your specific job, and do it well. Applying those tools within the automatic administration framework of an online recruiting and hiring system may make you a very good fisherman, indeed. At the very least, it will improve your odds of making a worthwhile catch!

John W. Howard, Ph.D.
More about John

iApplicants Now Feeds Job Listings to JuJu, Vast, & Jobster

2008-04-07T22:25:00.003-06:00

Announcing More Job Boards added to the EZPost System

We are excited to announce that we have added 3 new FREE job boards to our current job feed system provided to our iApplicants clients. These job boards will help you further expand your applicant pool and get your jobs in front of more job seekers. The best part is that pushing your jobs to these job boards is absolutely free as an iApplicants client.

iApplicants already allows clients to push their jobs to: indeed.com, simplyhired.com, oodle.com, google.com/base, craigslist.org, and the JobMatch job board network. We have now added 3 more exciting job boards:

Jobster

www.jobster.com

Juju

www.juju.com

Vast

www.vast.com

How To Get Started:

If you are already an iApplicants client, simply login to your admin area, and post a job. The job push page now includes the option to push your job to these new job boards. For current openings, you can modify your job and upon saving it will be given the option to select the new job boards.

If you are not an iApplicants client, getting started is simple. iApplicants provides flexible, easy to use, and affordable career sites and application management systems for employers with 20 to 2000 employees. You can click here to watch our flash demo presentation or you can click here to signup for a free 30-day trial!

Ryan Kohler, CEO
JobMatch LLC

More about Ryan

Applicant Tracking System RSS & Automated Email Job Alerts - FeedBurner Integration

2008-04-03T21:17:00.017-06:00

iApplicants is pleased to announce a new way to increase your applicant pool and better engage your careers site visitors using automated job alerts via email or RSS feed. It’s FREE for iApplicants clients, and we do all the setup for you!

The Challenge:

In studying the visitor data for our applicant tracking career sites (each client has a Google Analytics Account), there were two stats that stood out to me.

A majority of careers site visitors do not complete an application
And 30% to 40% of visitors are have already visited the site before

There are various reasons for both of these statistics, but regardless of the reason, this data posted a problem. We are missing a valuable opportunity to collect contact information on the majority of visitors who come to the careers site, and we are leaving it up to the job seekers to remember to return to the career site in hopes that their dream job is now available.

Solution:

The solution is to allow career site visitors to have the option to signup for job notification alerts, without having to apply for a job or create an account. We wanted seekers to have a wide range of different options for controlling how they receive job updates. FeedBurner provided us with a powerful solution to accomplish this task, and in the upcoming weeks we will launch a second tool using Twitter.com to further expand the job alert choices.

iApplicants Feeds Jobs to FeedBurner with RSS:

Each iApplicants site now has an RSS job feed, which includes the 15 most recent job listings, that can be turned on and pushed to FeedBurner. If you don’t know what RSS is, let me explain. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a way for a website with regularly changing content to allow people to stay informed about the changes without actually returning to the website to view it. It is used by news sites, blogs, and various other sites to keep their readers/visitors informed.

By giving the RSS feed to FeedBurner it becomes an RSS feed on steroids. FeedBurner provides different ways to distribute the job listings based on the desires of the job seeker.

How it Works:

If we turn on the Job Alerts feature, the search jobs page now has a box titled “Get Notified of New Jobs at Your Company” with choices for the job seeker on how they will be notified.

Automated Email Alerts:

Each day FeedBurner will check your job feed for new listings. If there are any new listings, the job seeker will receive a custom email including the new jobs and links to click on that take them to the job listing page.Job seekers only receive an email when there is a new job posted.

Jobs Listed on Personal Homepage:

If a job seeker has a personalized home page on their computer, such as those provided by MyYahoo and iGoogle, they can add a section that has your most recent jobs. They will then see your jobs every time they open their Internet browser.

Jobs Feed to RSS Readers

Many people use an RSS reader such as Google Reader to stay on top of all of the information they are interested in. Along side all of their favorite news stories and blog posts will be your newest job listings.

Republish your Jobs to Another Website Using HTML

FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost will let your job seekers, or even your employees publish your job listings on any other website using html. This includes their personal website or even to a page on your company’s website or blog. Below is an example of what this might look like:

Create a Job Widget

Similar to the BuzzBoost above, a SpringWidget allows someone to post a graphic with your job feed on a website or blog. This allows your seekers or employees to publish your feed on websites, blogs, messages boards, and even social networking sites like MySpace.com. Below is an example of what a SpringWidget might look like:

Get this widget!

How To Get Started:

If you are already an iApplicants client, simply login to your admin area, and enter a support ticket requesting that we turn on the Job Alerts feature on your site.

If you are not an iApplicants client, getting started is simple. iApplicants provides flexible, easy to use, and affordable career sites and application management systems for employers with 20 to 2000 employees. You can click here to watch our flash demo presentation or you can click here to signup for a free 30-day trial!

Ryan Kohler, CEO
JobMatch LLC

More about Ryan

Applicant Tracking Systems vs Search Engine Optimization

2008-03-12T02:56:00.006-06:00

Here is an interesting post concerning Applicant Tracking vendors and Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) concerning the employer career sites that they provide to their clients.

Link to Blog Entry: Why Say No to Recruitment SEO?
Original author: Jason Whitman (Director of Client Services)

The post talks about how some of the robots.txt files are telling search engines not to index the jobs on the sites.

For those of you who I lost at robots.txt, let me help explain this in plain English. Google, and the other search engines, have computer programs that go out and look at your website, or in the case of a careers site, it looks at your careers information and your job listings. These programs are known as “spiders”, “crawlers”, “bots”, etc. These “spiders” take a look at the information that is on each of your pages, and record it in their “index” or database. When you run a keyword search in Google, or any other search engine, the results you see are the made up of web pages that have been looked at and recorded by the spider, and the listings are ranked based on how well that page matches up to the keyword you search for.

As a web programmer, I can add a little text file to a website named robots.txt. That file allows me to tell a spider what pages to look at or not look at. By telling the spider not to look at a web page, it means it won’t record it in the index, and that page won’t appear in the search engine when someone runs a keyword search. There are various reasons why someone might want to do this, but for employer web pages and job listings, I can’t think of a good reason to block it.

Jason, the person who posted the article linked above, did some digging around and found that a few major ATS vendors were telling spiders not to index the job listings or careers sites of their clients. I’m not sure why they would do this, I’m sure that the software programmers had a valid reason in their mind for doing this. Since software programmers are generally not web marketers, they might not see the potential problems caused by blocking the spiders.

The blocking of the search engine spiders is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Career Sites and Search Engine Optimization. Even if the robots.txt file wasn't excluding the jobs from being indexed, it really wouldn't matter much for most ATS career sites. Most vendors simply aren't building SEO friendly career sites, for some reason SEO is simply not a priority. To make matters worse, many of their clients don’t want to send their job seekers off of the company website over to the ATS careers website, so they try to use a frame to display the job listings. In plain English, you land on www.samplecompany.com/jobs and that page shows you the job listings from your ATS system on the page. If you click on a job, the page content changes, but the url remains the same as www.samplecompany.com/jobs. This is bad for the search engines and stops your jobs from being indexed or harms the rankings of those jobs. The end result, it keeps you from getting free applicants directly from the search engines, and everyone loves free job applicants.

This ATS verses Search Engine Optimization has been something that I’ve thought over quite a few times in the last 3 years. I have come up with a few ideas of why this is happening, but they are just my own speculation:

#1 ATS companies are made up of, and ran by, software folks, not web marketers. For some reason there is a huge difference in how these 2 groups build things from the ground up. Software guys tend to follow what they have always done, and those habits continue to get in the way of SEO for the systems they design.

#2 There is little to no demand for search engine optimization by the clients using ATS systems. Ask any HR manager, especially at smaller companies under 2000 employees, what SEO is, and 95% don't know. Even those that do, don't understand it enough to pitch it to their bosses to get money for it. If they did get buy in from the boss, without web analytics they couldn't prove that they were getting visitors or applicants from the keywords, and the cycle just keeps repeating. Without proof, you can’t get funding increased to be more aggressive with SEO, etc, etc.

#3 Problem 2 results in there being no money in it for the ATS vendor. Since clients don't demand it, they definitely won't pay for it, and vendors therefore won't built it.

#4 It is definitely not in the best interests of the major job boards, recruiters, headhunters, etc to have jobs showing up in the search results of Google with direct links to the employer’s careers page. This would mean that the job boards would be competing directly with the employers for the traffic. Since most speakers talking about online recruiting at events and seminars are from one of these sources, SEO is simply not part of the conversation, and so SEO is not gaining traction with employers.

This has been one of the most amazing things that I have seen in this industry. We built iApplicants to be search engine friendly simply because of my background. When you come from the Internet Marketing world, SEO is always part of the design of a website. If you could build a system that would provide a valuable tracking tool to your clients, and generate free traffic from the search engines just because you built it the right way, why wouldn't you do it? I knew that our clients wouldn't understand SEO or pay for it, but I knew it would pay off in the end.

As of now our search engine friendly careers pages combined with our pushes to the free job boards like InDeed.com account for an average increase in applicant flow to our client’s sites of more than 20% each month. That is a number that HR understands. We use that increase to show that buying iApplicants will generally pay for itself just off of the value of the increased applicants, and the other benefits will just be the icing on the cake.

Ryan Kohler, MBA
CEO of JobMatch LLC
More about Ryan

Blog Contributor - Ryan Kohler, MBA

2008-03-12T00:24:00.000-06:00

About Ryan
Ryan has over 7 years experience providing Internet marketing and developing web-based software for companies in various industries and for different uses from e-commerce sites to lead management software. In his current role with JobMatch, he uses the Internet marketing tactics that are generally used by marketing departments to build tools that help employers source applicants via the Internet. The goal is to not just tell employers and HR staff about new ideas, but to instead build them into their current systems and process so they happen automatically without creating more work for the HR department. Ryan holds a B.S degree in Accounting and an MBA from Southern Utah University.

About JobMatch LLC
JobMatch LLC is a hiring software and marketing company specializing in helping employers better manage and track their hiring process. A core focus of the company's products and services is to go beyond just tracking applicants and provide additional tools to help employers attract more qualified applicants to their jobs. This includes use of search engines, .jobs domains, job feeds to alternative job boards and social networking sites, as well as employee referral programs. Along with targeting different areas of the Internet to increasing applicant flow, JobMatch also helps employers to target specific segments of their applicant pool such as the Gen X and Gen Y crowds.

Blog Contributor - John W. Howard, Ph.D.

2008-03-12T00:18:00.004-06:00

About John
John earned his Doctorate in Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Oregon in 1977, and worked for the next two years in private, non-profit research organizations. With an inclination for business and a desire to apply his education in a real-world setting, he launched a 30-year career in entrepreneurial settings, owning and managing several different successful businesses. Twice he set up from scratch sales organizations that built annual sales from zero to over $100 million, in periods of less than 5 years.

Looking for (GOOD CANDIDATES) in All the Wrong Places...

2008-03-07T07:59:00.008-07:00

The hiring manager’s job was, historically, a matter of placing an ad in newspapers, perhaps posting it on local bulletin boards, maybe toying with a radio ad or two...getting people to apply, at least for most openings, was not the hard part of the job.

Anyone filling that role today is sharply aware: Things have changed. Applicants are in short supply, especially skilled applicants. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, America’s workforce will need 18 million new college degrees by 2012...just 5 short years from now. America’s colleges, however, will produce only 12 million new degree holders—and there’s no practical way to quickly adjust output.

Over the next 5 years, America will produce only 2 new college degree holders for every 3 we need!

If you think it’s hard to find highly skilled workers now, hold on to your ergonomic desk chair—this ride’s going to get rougher!

Hiring managers have increasingly turned to Internet job boards and recruiting services to help them find the applicants they need. Is it possible, however, they’re missing the boat—looking for candidates in all the wrong places?
Global business strategy consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, released a 2006 Recruiting Trends Survey, commissioned by the Direct Employers Association. Among their findings:

Over 50% of New Hires were sourced from the Internet in 2005.

Employers spent the largest proportion of their recruitment budgets on General Job Boards in 2005.

Employers were most happy with Return on Investment from (in order of satisfaction) Employee Referrals, their own Employment Web Sites, Campus Recruiting, and Niche Job Boards.

Given the last finding, why are so many dollars being spent on General Job Boards?!? As the report pointed out, nearly 21% of new hires, for the companies surveyed, came from the employer’s own employment website...yet, a quick sampling of company websites shows an amazing range of quality and attention to the “Careers” section in these sites, with most of the smaller companies having no employment functions on their site, or only a minimal set of job listings and contact information. Obviously, a great deal of room for improvement exists in this area, and employers who provide a quality employment section on their websites will reap a real benefit in return on the investment.

Employee Referral programs were the second leading source of numbers of applicants reported (18%), and led all sources in ROI...yet the number of employers without any employee referral program at all was reported at 44% in a recent BLR.com poll.
Recently, employee referral programs have been criticized as restricting efforts to increase workplace diversity (since employees tend to refer people much like themselves). An effective company employment website, together with an applicant tracking system capable of collecting and reporting EEO data, can go a long way to counter such criticism—especially when coupled with other diversity recruiting efforts.

Finally, company employment websites and employee referral programs rank well above all other sources in quality of hires. This year, seek your new hires in the right places! Make an early resolution.

John W. Howard, Ph.D.
More about John

New Online Recruiting & Applicant Tracking Blog

2008-03-06T22:31:00.008-07:00

After months (actually over a year) of good intentions, we are proud to announce the launch of the iApplicants blog. This blog will be dedicated to providing employers of all shapes and sizes, but especially small to mid-sized employers, with information and helpful tips to improve the results of their recruiting and hiring efforts. The goal is to provide information that will be useful to readers, regardless of their user of iApplicants. Content for the blog will be provided by different members of the iApplicants team, including some of our resellers and partners. Topics will range from sourcing of applicants (both online and off), applicant tracking, hiring assessments, and any other topic that seems to fit in with our general theme.

Not only are we hoping to provide some useful information to our readers, but we would also like to spark up a conversation that will result in the sharing of best practices. Please feel free to post comments, questions, and recommendations.

Sincerely,

Ryan Kohler, CEO
JobMatch LLC