For the past fifteen years, the process of finding qualified job applicants for your open roles was a straightforward, classified ad model: Spend some money, post a job on a job board, and wait for candidates to apply. It was a digital version of the “Help Wanted” section in the newspaper, and for the most it worked pretty well.
Just like online job boards like Monster and Careerbuilder changed the landscape of recruiting in the early 2000’s, today Google and Facebook are disrupting this massive industry with tools built for the digital habits of the job seeker. Your success in hiring the right people will come down to your ability to adapt to the changes these two technology giants are delivering.
Google and Facebook are going to turn online recruiting into a marketing-centric business. Here’s why:
Searching for a new job is a big deal.
The search for a new job is one of the most important searches in a person’s life, and both Google and Facebook know it. They also know that job seekers are also consumers, and these individuals have certain digital habits and expectations that, when met, increase the likelihood that they’ll apply to a certain company’s job listing online.
When you look into the way Google and Facebook manage consumer advertising, they penalize marketers who deliver a poor user experience; ads whose sites are text-heavy or contain irrelevant information pay more money per click. Call it a tax on poor user experience.
Just like with consumer marketing, Google and Facebook are going to prioritize search results that contain relevant video and text-based content. They want to deliver a great search experience to the consumer, and that means your company will need to come very good at employment branding and SEO-optimized job listings. Better listings will get more traffic, and the companies who receive that
Candidates care about your company’s culture.
With the rise of third party employer review sites, it’s become clear that job seekers are researching a company’s culture before applying to an open position. Google and Facebook have followed this trend, and they see an opportunity to curate these results in a way that gives job seekers the best search results. It’s no longer just about the open job; it’s about the company’s culture.
This shift in focus means that your company will need to build and manage its employment brand like never before. Culture videos, employee testimonials, and documented career paths are all must-have items when building your next-generation careers page for your company.
Companies that build out a dedicated career site and invest in their own content will have a huge advantage of companies who are forced to pay for clicks because Google ranks their site on page ten of a candidate’s job search.
It’s in their interest to do so.
The real reason that Google and Facebook have launched job search platforms? Because job search is a $200 billion dollar market, and it’s theirs for the taking.
Once these tech juggernauts decide that they’re going to own a new consumer category, they usually do. When you search for houses, cars, hotels or flights, Google serves up its own search results first. They can then monetize that online real estate.
Five years from now, we will be struggling to recall what it was like to look for a job on an online job board. We’ll tap our social network, or we’ll just jump to Google and start our job search right there in the browser. We’ll see a host of options directly from the employers offering the jobs, and a lot less from third-party intermediaries like job boards.
Is your company treating its employment brand like the valuable asset that it is?