Standout Jobs

On May 15th and 16th we saw more sign-ups for our free job site software than ever before. I wasn’t able to immediately track down the reason, but just recently I figured it out. I was reading a blog post on ERE’s site about Southwest Airlines new blog and saw that a presentation had been embedded in the post. The presentation - titled Web 2.0 Recruiting - was a webinar put on by Kevin Wheeler.

As I was going through the slides, I was pleasantly surprised (on Slide #27) to see Standout Jobs featured. Kevin’s been supportive from the get-go, but I didn’t expect him to use us as an example of effective Web 2.0 recruiting.

Here’s the presentation:

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Personally, I don’t think we need studies anymore to prove the value of using social media and social networking (both the principles and tools) for recruiting purposes. Still, it’s always worthwhile to see studies emerge that say exactly that:

Also, a study conducted recently in the United Kingdom shows that only 10% of recruiters use social networking sites and only a small minority use blogs, videos, or other Web 2.0 technology for recruitment. The research suggests that one of the reasons why social networks have been slow to take off as a recruitment tool is because recruiters do not consider them a credible way to communicate, despite large numbers of their target labor market using them regularly.

“Recruiters may be missing a trick by not adopting Web 2.0 technology. They need to engage with job seekers to encourage them to apply for jobs. Text-heavy recruitment pages with no interactivity will not win the hearts and minds of the Web 2.0 generation,” said Cranfield University research fellow Emma Parry, in the study.

It’s not necessarily hard to get people to apply for a job. Getting the right people to apply is another story. One way to improve the quality of applicants, is to improve the quality of content you put out as an employer. It will attract likeminded people. And for those that apply almost randomly to hundreds of jobs at once, it becomes dead simple to filter them out; because you can very quickly tell they put no effort into applying.

So a quick thank you to Kevin Wheeler for using Standout Jobs as an example, and hopefully we’re able to generate great results for all the companies that signed up after watching his webinar in action.