Whether you have a fully operating recruitment agency, you’re employed as a recruiter, or you’re thinking about opening a recruitment business, WordPress is an amazing tool! Because of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities and user friendly templates and widgets, companies such as Ebay, The Wall Street Journal, Sony, Flickr, Forbes, The New York Times, Samsung, CNN, Wired and many more use WordPress for their publications and public social interactions.
Assuming that there’s a basic understanding of WordPress or a willingness to look around in the admin area, no one needs to be a techie or programmer to learn WordPress. For those willing to learn, there’re many ways to utilize WordPress for recruitment and for SEO.
1) Get Official Hosting – It’s natural to assume you can get set up directly through WordPress.com, and you can if you would like to do a basic blog. For optimal SEO, proper widget integration, and great looking templates you will need to obtain a hosted WordPress blog installed on a dot com of your choosing through hosts such as GoDaddy or Bluehost (this does have a minimal cost). After purchasing the dot com, don’t forget to select a template or have a designer/developer create one.
2) Get the Right Widgets- For recruitment and SEO, the best widgets to download are Job Manager and WordPress SEO by Yoast. Job Manager will allow you to post jobs on the blog site. It also includes a great application collection that can forward applicants to an email. Posted jobs should be picked up by search engines as well. Yoast’s app will help you manage every single page, post, and job post to tailor them for SEO analysis by encouraging the use of key words in titles, meta-descriptions, content etc. It will also rank how good the SEO is and direct blog owners into increasing the optimization.
3) How to Use the Blog Posts- Post about career successes, candidates, or company news. The actual blog posts are up to each recruiter’s creative style. Personally, I choose to post about amazing candidates I’m supporting and working with. Each post has great key words, gets cataloged in search engines, and provides me a link to Tweet about and to use for Linkedin updates. These posts could also be used for company news, new hires, and to promote amazing recruitment accomplishments!
WordPress is a devotion of time, but a worthy one. Learning the backend and how to manipulate templates for personalization can test ones creativity and patience at the beginning, especially for the non-techies. Be tough because it’s a worthy investment on time initially, especially for recruiters who would like to optimize their time in the long run. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be blogging and using WordPress to save you time and energy!
Image:SEO Planter/Flickr
Author: Kristen Diane McDonald
Kristen Diane is an experienced Creative and Technical Recruiter who’s worked with some of the most prestigious ad agencies and video game studios in North America. As an avid traveler, experiencing different cultures, customs and ways of thinking has greatly influenced her career. She has recruitment roots planted in human resources, both in the US and Canada, and has extensive experience as a newsletter writer. The transition to career blog writing only seemed like a natural progression. Follow her on Twitter.
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