Recruitment blogs are becoming a popular part of online recruitment marketing strategies.
A blog (a shortened version of “web log") is a specialised web site that allows an individual, or group of individuals, to share a running commentary of events and personal insights with online audiences.
If properly executed, a recruitment blog added to your career site can be a powerful tool for communicating with potential new employees. But be warned - if you do not have the resources or commitment to update the site regularly with quality content this strategy could backfire and not make the positive impression that you intended.
An easy way to create a useful blog is to share the work amongst a small group of co-workers. Pick a few good writers in your department, or across departments, to regularly contribute their insights. Officially allocate an hour for each contributor to research and write an entry, and ideally update the blog every two or three days.
The main purpose of a recruitment blog is to promote your company, advertise current and future job posts, and attract graduates to your programme. You need to grab the interest of your readers to keep them coming back.
Suggestions:
- Assign recent graduate hires to blog about their experience, this can be what they’ve learned, all the cool things they are involved in (pick carefully and don’t let this backfire).
- Address graduate issues.
- Include product information.
- Add recruitment requirements.
- Write about your interview process and how to apply.
- Include “A day in the life” from members of different departments.
- Add commentary on relevant industry news and issues.
- Comments on company news.
- Job hunting tips.
- Interview with a graduate.
Many blogs link to relevant articles and other blog posts, so if you are regularly keeping up with your industry, this should be a breeze. A good recruitment blog will also have the benefit of increasing your ranking on search engine results. An interesting blog will attract links from other pages (a key to high placements) and changing, varied content will naturally add more key words.
A good example of a graduate recruitment blog is Microsoft Jobsblog. blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/
What are your thoughts on recruitment blogs? Please leave a comment and let us know.
-Susanna
PS -- Our next post in this series is on "desiging an effective selection process".
This post is an excerpt from Advorto's “15-minute guide to graduate recruiting”. You can download the full report for FREE.
Did you mention the replies and comments you are hoping to anticipate?
And how to get noticed by Google so you come up in searchs?
Posted by: Jo | October 15, 2008 at 17:14
Good show!
At EMC we've been exploring this space. We took a slightly more subtle approach -- I like to call it "Trip Advisering" the work at EMC experience. At our employment brand blog titled, "Building Careers, Culture and Cool at EMC," we work to humanize the EMC experience. Visitors find profiles of EMCers, stories from happenings in our global hallways, insights into awards and anything else that I find amusing or interesting that I believe helps to shed light on EMC as a place to work. On the blog, I also offer links to all the other EMC bloggers -- so people can "get to know" some of our technologists, managers, green IT gurus, digital media gurus and lots of other folks who make up the fabric of EMC. We welcome your thoughts and ideas on this approach. I've been writing this blog since March of 2008 and work to get 1 or 2 posts up a week. The blog can also be found on our EMC.com/careers site.
Regards,
Polly Pearson
VP Employment Brand and Strategy Engagement
EMC Corp
http://www.pollypearson.com/
Posted by: polly pearson | October 16, 2008 at 17:13
Great work! Thanks for sharing it.
Posted by: Faiqa | May 25, 2009 at 12:04
I know that some parents have sponsored their graduate children on intensive job hunting and interview skills programmes such as the main one run by http://www.jobsforgrads.co.uk - the parent I spoke to said her son had found the coaching invaluable and it helped him get a job quickly with a top-3 UK bank.
Posted by: Jenny Hargreaves | November 10, 2009 at 18:19