In the coming months, I’m going to be focusing some of Water Cooler Wisdom’s content around employee recruitment and retention techniques.  Let’s start with the obvious: the e-advertisements that you, as a manager or HR rep, might be perennially posting on major online job boards.  You know that these boards receive tons of traffic, but do you know where this traffic comes from?  The fact is, millions of job related searches are performed on the top search engines – Google, Yahoo!, and MSN – every day. 

In order to recruit candidates effectively online, you must leverage the search engines appropriately, making it easy for you to find the best people and for the best people to find you.  Many of you probably already know that search engine algorithms follow a specific path for indexing relevant content.  For example, the closer your e-advertisement for a technical architect in Jacksonville, Florida follows this format, the higher your content will rank when the perfect candidate does a search for this specific job.

If you don’t know where to start, you’re not alone.  Fortunately, some job boards that host e-advertisements, like our very own Getthejob.com, are offering specific features that target search engine visibility, like OptiJob.  OptiJob helps you organize job content, including e-advertisements, RSS feeds, and website URLs, in a way that will make it most palatable to the search engines so that you’re getting noticed ahead of your competition.

It doesn’t do any good to spend your precious recruiting dollars on e-advertisements that no one ever sees.  If you’re going to write them and post them, make sure your candidates read them!