You’ve invested in a great website that even integrates with your recruiting software and leading job boards, but is that enough? Search engines, such as Google and Bing, reward websites for fresh and quality content. Creating a blog for your recruiting website is an easy way to boost your SEO and attract more traffic—when done the right way.
Blogs are not a fit for everyone. You need to dedicate time to post on a consistent basis, or your page is at risk of appearing out of date. Candidates trust you to take care of them. If you can’t keep up with your own website, how can you make time for their needs? However, blogging doesn’t have to be a burden. It can be as simple as reacting to an article that you read on LinkedIn or funny recruiting stories.
Having people find you more often through organic search methods is just one of the benefits of blogging. By blogging consistently, you can also attract more repeat visitors to your site. If visitors see that you’re providing something of value, not only will they keep coming back for more, but they’ll also tell their friends and colleagues about you.
3 Easy Steps to Create a Recruiting Blog
Step 1: Customize your page
There are many avenues that you can choose to make your blog stand out from the millions of other blogs. Some are paid and some are free, but you should choose whichever one works for you. If you only want to post 100-word quick reads, you don’t need a complex blog platform. But if you want to support a community of conversations with your visitors and accept guest posts, you may want to have multiple options for the page layout.
No matter which choice you make, there are a few practices you should remember when creating a blog:
- Include the blog as a part of your website. Remember, one of the purposes of a blog is to help drive traffic to your site, and search engines reward you if the content of your site is updated on a consistent basis.
- Pick a simple layout that is easy to navigate. Visitors won’t stay on your page if they can’t find what they are looking for right away.
- Make sure the platform is engaging for your visitors. Content is king, and including an infographic or short video are great options to tell your story in a different way.
Step 2: Personalize your content
Publish interesting articles for your target audience. For recruiters, this audience includes both candidates and hiring managers. The goal is to provide something of value—industry expertise and information that visitors will find useful. They will be likely to return to your website over and over again, if you give they view you as a recourse and not a salesman.
However, what exactly do your website visitors want to read about? Recruiters always seem to be in the process of educating both groups of people about the job market, employment, and hiring process steps. Since you do this every day, you can simply take the topics that you discuss with candidates and hiring managers, and turn them into blog posts. By doing this, you’re positioning yourself as an expert in your field, and people always look to experts when they want answers to their questions.
Topics for candidates
- What to include in your resume
- How to prepare for a face-to-face interview
- How to conduct yourself during a face-to-face interview
- How to write a letter of resignation to your current employer
- How to find an employer that fits your personality and values
Topics for hiring managers
- How and why to conduct a courtesy interview
- When to extend an offer of employment
- How to on-board employees successfully
- How to retain A-level employees
- How to create an effective mentoring program
Step 3: Optimize your results
Your ultimate goal is to convert prospects, which are obtained through blog posts, into revenue (which means placements for recruiters). In other words, you want candidates to submit their resume and other information for your recruiting database, and you want hiring officials to give you job orders for your recruiting CRM (or at the very least, contact you via email or over the phone).
For the best results, include a call to action at the end of every blog post. It can be a bright button or phrase that is hyperlinked to a landing page on your website. Ideally, the call to action should be related to the topic of the post.