What the latest Google changes mean for Recruiters

Google is constantly working to develop and improve its product offering. These changes meet with differing levels of approval from the world at large, but regardless of how we see them, the changes are here to stay.

Some facts

Google is the world’s No.1 search engine. It owns You Tube, the third largest site on the Internet. Google + and their brand pages are growing with significant momentum. It is too big and too important to be ignored.

Content is king

If you are serious about using the Internet as a marketing tool, then you need to work with and understand how to maximize for Google. In the last 18 months Google has made 3 significant changes to the way it returns search results: Caffeine, Panda and Search, Plus Your World. Each of these changes continues to highlight the importance of content.

What do these updates mean for recruiters?

Caffeine

This update works to enable Google to produce search results more quickly the content is published. Ignoring the technical stuff, the upshot is that they are now able to identify different types of searches and the ‘freshness’ of results required. This change has affected 1 billion searches worldwide so far!

Ans: Recruiters need to publish new content constantly to stay ahead.

Panda

This update works to penalise those websites with poor quality, or duplicated content. It has two major impacts:

1. Sites that merely copy vacancy information from other sites to publish on their own are demoted in search results.

2. Sites deemed to have low quality content (identified by what is viewed, for how long, how many adverts you run etc) are demoted in the search results.

Ans: Recruiters need to publish high quality, original content to stay ahead.

Search, Plus Your World

This is the latest and more significant change for recruiters, and adds a social element to search results.

Now when you search the web, Google takes into account your social sphere (read Google + here) when sorting results. This has to do with research into how people trust and value the results given by search engines as opposed to how we value recommendations from friends.

For example – when you search for a restaurant to eat at in London, Google now looks to your social connections and if any have reviewed one, that restaurant would get priority in the search results.

Can recruiters use this change to their advantage? Yes, yes indeed.

How this works in the real world

Imagine that you publish an article “Writing a great CV” on your website and also share it with your ‘candidate’ circle on Google +.

One of your candidates (John) really likes the article and shares it with his ‘friends’ circle. John’s friend (Rebecca) sees it on her stream but doesn’t do anything with it because she isn’t job-hunting at that time.

A while later, however, Rebecca decides to look for a new job and searches Google for CV writing advice. Because of the previous social connection with John, your article is prioritised in her search results.

Rebecca reads your article, clicks through to your website, searches current vacancies, likes the look of one, applies and hey presto, you are connected with a candidate who previously may never have come across your website at all.

Of course, to make this work we need to publish content that others want to share.

Ans: Recruiters need to publish high quality and highly sharable content to stay ahead.

Content, content, content

It has never been a secret that regularly providing fresh, high quality content brings more and more people to your website. In each of these 3 latest updates content is the clear message that Google wants us to hear.

Please listen their message.

Those recruiters who regularly publish high quality, shareable content are going to come up in Google search results much higher than those who don’t.

Where do you want to come up in Google search results?

Contact me

For more on developing yourself, your staff and improving the profitability of your business, please do get in touch. You can email me at james@jamesnathan.com, use the contact page on my website www.jne-recruitment-academy.com or call me on 07736 831151. Follow me on Twitter at @recruit_eagle, connect to me on LinkedIn, or follow me on Facebook.

I look forward to speaking soon.

Comment by Noel Cocca on February 20, 2012 at 6:39pm: Nice post James...knowing how to work with Google is key and understanding how the SEO works can help recruiters and bloggers alike...

Comment by Gareth Mason on February 21, 2012 at 5:04am: I would echo John Kreiss's comments, though Linkedin is extremely useful, with 200,000 recruiters using it, how you use it becomes the most important factor. In my line of work, we've found that Twitter and Facebook offer very limited engagement with your target audience. A little bit like shouting from the roof tops.

Comment by james nathan on February 21, 2012 at 5:09am: There is no doubt that a combined social media programme is important, I am finding that a good combination of Linked In, and Blogging (like to this site) provide excellent engagement, with content content content pushed to twitter, google+ and Facebook. Your audience use a number of different media, and the goal is to get to them where ever they appear. BUT, google is the big boy in searching and page one and two on their search results is prime if you want to get to the audience who search for your services online.

Comment by Gareth Mason on February 21, 2012 at 5:24am: I agree totally. There many ways of ensuring natural SEO, this is good news for small firms where cashflow can be an issue and paying a 3rd party to do it is out of the question. If you're specialist recruiter then leverage that knowledge online with content. Keep your blogs up to date and make relevant videos to answer questions that your target audience are asking. Listening first, before you engage.