You do a little bit every day to move the needle. In 2010, Hudson did a lotta bit every day to try to move the needle. One of the things we examined were our Client facing websites for Hudson North America. In the staffing and professional services business what you try to sell most is trust. Trust that our people are the best at what they do, and trust that we have been there and solved your problem before. The problem is that most clients are skeptical when you talk about yourself all the time. “We’re the best this”, or “Look at all about us”. What they want to know is “How can you help me?”; “Do you understand my problems?”. So, we made a simple shift from talking about us, to trying to identify with client problems. We then featured some key case studies that prove that we can solve the kinds of problems that clients have.

These were baby steps of progress in 2010. Have a look at my Hudson Microsites 2010 Portfolio entry to read more details about the redesign project. I thought it was a good time to post it and get any comments from the market. We are learning, and embarking on further redesign work to continue to push our sites to help our clients address their business issues.

Click to view 2004-2009 home page

Click to view 2010 home page

Twitter WAS an excellent tool for getting a job the old fashioned way – through word of mouth, networking, and building relationships online. For a few fleeting months, you could go onto Twitter and connect with some really smart people. You could connect with a senior manager, or a drone working the desk at any number of your potential employers of choice. You could build a relationship with a human, and help each other to mutual benefit. It WAS fresh and different. It will now turn into something automated, and dissatisfying.

TwitterJobSearch.com launched very recently. It provides job seekers an easy way to find job opportunities that have been posted to Twitter. That’s not really what it does though. Instead, TwitterJobSearch.com makes it blatantly obvious that there are hundreds of people out there building a mini job-spam empire on Twitter. Clearly, many recruiting firms and job board vendors alike have registered twitter names to game the search engines into believing they are the authority on ChicagoTechjobs, or topjobsinlondon whatever. They load up their twitter accounts with automated feeds from the job board they already have online.

So, riddle me this. How exactly does this make things any better for the job seeker? If TwitterJobSearch.com was aggregating a ton of job related tweets from actual humans working at actual companies and recruitment firms, with actual photo avatars of themselves, THAT would be a great service. Seekers can find plenty of cold, impersonal “job postings” all over the interweb. What they thirst for is the hiring manager at a company who tweets, “We need a marketing mgr to launch a new product for us, RT please”, or the recruiter that says “My client is interviewing for 3 java devs TODAY to build a GPS product by end of Jan, DM me if interested.”

Instead of optimizing FOR all of these automated accounts with “jobs” or “hire” in the Twitter handle, TwitterJobSearch should exclude them on purpose. What do you think?

In the spirit of stashing useful web strategy video in a spot that I can remember it, here’s an excellent video interview by WebProNews with Bruce Clay on the future of SEO and how it will move away from ranking and placement.

Here’s the things I learned.

1. Biased results based on web history: No two people will be able to look at Google results and get exactly the same rankings.
2. Intent based search: The engines will decipher your search words and give you results based on whether you intended to shop or do research. How you design a page for one intent or another would affect its ranking in results
3. Universal Search: Search will dive into video and images better than today. Sites with video, for instance will fare better. Doing SEO will be more than just keyword research and writing techniques. Text-based gateway pages would not be as effective, nor will linkbuilding have as great an effect.

Good stuff.

Hat tip to Cheezhead.

Check out more of the Poetic Prophet, m0serious on YouTube. He raps about the nuances of Search Engine Optimization, paid search, and link building and campaign conversion. I actually get more information out of listening to his raps than most “real” webinars. I think it’s because very few words must be chosen to get across big ideas. This is not a skill most public speakers have mastered.

Hat tip to Ann Handley of MarketingProfs.

Google Trends is a fun toy to play with if you are trying to figure out whether Paris Hilton or Britney Spears is more popular on Google. There are other interesting comparisons within Marissa Meyer’s Google Trends Tutorial that coincide with an analysis of the hottest searches of 2007. My question is, how can this Google popularity contest be used if you work at a staffing firm?

Competitor Popularity
Google Trends analyzes how many searches have been done for the terms entered. From reviewing Hudson’s own weblogs I know that a LOT of incoming traffic to our website is from users typing our company name into Google and not the browser address bar. I often use this as a gauge of name recognition. A person heard our name someplace and is on the hunt to find us. Let’s have a look at a few staffing firms shall we?

Vendor Popularity
Can we then find out the popularity amongst the general public of our job board and sourcing friends by seeing their relative popularity in Google Search? Try putting in your favorite vendors and see how they’ve been trending over the last few years.

Job Market Popularity
You can get a general sense for the size of different job categories by feeding those into the tool. It is interesting to see that the searches on all of the categories follow a volume pattern that decreases from Q1 through to Q4, except in 2007 when Q3 seems to have more seekers in the market.

Perhaps you can comment with other interesting Google Trends you see that are relevant. Once the impending API for Google Trends gets released, maybe some smart developer can make a website out of Google Trends for recruiting. I would love to see it mimic the “Today’s Hot Trends” list, and make it be Today’s Hot Job Trends.

I’m not necessarily big on the “recruito-sphere” as a place for interactive marketers of staffing firms to hang out every minute of their spare time. I prefer to try to find resources from marketers in other industries and apply them to ours. This helps bring a more innovative approach to everything we do. For instance, find out what Coke’s latest technique in loyalty marketing is, and figure out how it could apply to an online consultant retention program within your staffing firm.

On occasion however, I do pull nuggets of value from recruiter-focused blogs. Today, it was a resource on the basics of SEO from RecruitingFly.com. Essentially he took advice from free and paid SEO consulting resources out there, and made them applicable to the savvy recruiting firm marketer. He packaged it nicely into a guide that quite honestly I’m surprised he isn’t asking people to pay for. However, I think RecruitingFly is deriving much more SEO value from making the content free (after all his guide DOES mention that content is king) than he would get from coaxing 25 bucks from people to buy it. I’m going to consume the content and implement some of the recommendations (especially those on link building for recruiting firms) as fast as I can.