While many education employers have taken steps to optimize their talent-acquisition strategies, some are still overlooking cost-effective options to reach a larger field of candidates.
Many recruiters, for example, have reduced their need for job-board resume databases by leveraging applicant tracking systems to capture prospective candidates on their own Web sites. Fewer, however, have successfully tailored their online recruitment-outreach to take advantage of search engines, social media networks, and other platforms.
Talent managers looking to quickly attract more applicants through search engines have several options, including:
• Asking your Web site administrator to employ basic SEO (search engine optimization) to your Web employment pages.
• Including SEO as a factor when evaluating any Web development, tracking systems, and job-boards.
• Creating job postings that have SEO-friendly job titles and descriptions.
To help its clients extend their reach on the Web, Education Week TopSchoolJobs aggressively leverages search engines to deliver additional candidates to recruiters. By optimizing specific web pages, job postings are seen by not only core print and online readers, but also hundreds of thousands of candidates who begin their education job search with Google. This can be seen when performing a Google search for “superintendent jobs” or “school principal jobs”.
While the most cost-effective recruiting strategies cannot be implemented overnight, today’s recruiter must ensure that they (or their recruiting partners) leverage search engines. Ultimately, understanding how your web pages, favorite job boards, social media pages, and other recruitment strategies perform today will be the basis for cost-effective recruitment tomorrow.
—Jonathan Rogers
Product Manager
