Why Google Is The Recruiter’s Best Friend

Recruitment can often be quite ‘old school’. ‘Get on the phones and get some business!’ Is the cry that can be heard on sales floors across the UK. Quite right too, there’s no better way of bringing in business than the good old telephone.

However, as we live in the digital age, it’s important to use the tools available to us to maximise our effectiveness as recruiters. There are a heap of specialist recruitment software providers who promise to revolutionise your business and make you a better recruiter. Maybe so, but thanks to Google, there are some fantastic tools that are available free of charge that can give you a real edge over your competitors.

Google’s Keyword Planner

https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

Sign up for a Google Adwords account (it’s free) and you get access to Google’s keyword planner. This is where you can look at the raw data of what people are searching for in Google, as it gives you the average number of searches per month for whatever word or phrase you enter. This, used correctly, can give you a fantastic insight as to what people are searching for in your chosen industry and in your locality, as you can drill down the info into more specific parameters. Have a play around with it and you could well find some enlightening information.

Details of how to use the keyword planner can be found here: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-the-keyword-planner-the-new-keyword-tool-from-google-adwords-157123

Google Alerts

https://www.google.co.uk/alerts

Get yourself a free Gmail account and you have access to one of the most powerful tools in recruitment, the Google Alert. This lets you ask Google to notify you as soon as a certain phrase is published on the internet. So, for example, let’s say you recruit in the engineering sector. You could set up an alert for ‘new engineering company’, which will alert you by email every time this phrase is published. This could let you know about a new engineering company that is being set up far earlier than your competitors. It’s worth having a play around with this and experimenting with different phrases and parameters. Once it’s up and running, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Google Trends

https://www.google.com/trends/

This is a valuable tool that can give you enlightening insights into what is happening in your industry, what is likely to happen, and where you should be targeting. Google Trends gives you a graph that shows how popular the search term you entered has been over the past few years. From this, you can see whether there is an upward trend, or a downward trend. If, for example you recruit computer programmers, you might want to compare languages to see which are becoming more or less popular.

So, you may find ‘Visual Basic’ is a language that is declining, whereas ‘jquery’ is a programming environment that is becoming more popular. You would then obviously know that you should be targeting ‘jquery’ candidates more, as they should in theory be easier to place due to an expanding market.

Whilst the fundamental skills of recruitment are important, it is vital that you keep pace with technology and use it to your best advantage. Set aside an hour a week to explore what is happening technology wise in the recruitment sector. Tools like those above, not only make you a more effective recruiter, they can save you time by helping you target, which means you can spend more time doing the really important tasks, like bringing new business in.

Till next time,

Cheryl