A few essential things are critical to the success of a sales recruitment jobsite, or any specialist jobsite for that matter. Why am I only discussing specialist jobsites and not generalist jobsites, I think that will become apparent as we progress our discussion using a sales recruitment jobsite as our specialist example.

A few basic things are critical to the success of a sales recruitment jobsite, or any specialist jobsite for that matter. Why am I only discussing specialist jobsites and not generalist jobsites, I think that will become apparent as we progress our discussion using a sales recruitment jobsite as our specialist example.

The few critical factors that will make a specialist jobsite work for you the recruiter are very much common sense. Firstly the right potential candidates must be attracted to the site, secondly the jobseeker must be enticed by the site to search and apply for jobs and to register there details so that recruiters can contact them in the future. The third criteria relates to you the recruiter, the site must be easy to use and give you access to the right candidates in a timely and cost efficient manner. All sounds fairly easy so far, so how do you go about assessing if you are about to spend money using the right jobsite? You could take a free trail and some sites do offer this, however many do not and how much time and energy do you have available to waste testing out inadequate sales recruitment jobsites?

Returning to our first factor, the right potential candidates being attracted to the jobsite, how does a jobsite go about attracting the right jobseekers to the website? The following is a list of the major routes to achieving this goal

• Search Engine Optimisation

• Email Marketing

• Pay Per Click Advertising

• Affiliate Programmes

• Online PR / Press Releases

• Blog marketing * Directories

• Link Programmes

• Social Network Marketing

• Offline Marketing - Television and Print Media

All of a sudden it does not look so simple and if a good jobsite is using all of these marketing and promotion techniques to drive quality jobseekers to the site, how do you know if they are doing it and doing it effectively, with some specialist sites charging as much as £400 for a single advert, getting it wrong could be a serious mistake.

If we go back to our good old friend Google, it can give us some insight. For example I am a recruiter wanting to recruit sales personnel. I know that Monster Jobs is regularly advertising on TV and all over the web, it is quite expensive which makes you think well perhaps that is because they invest a lot of money driving jobseekers to their collection of global jobsites. A quick search of the URL for monster UK, as you are recruiting for a sales person in the UK gives over 85000 results that contain a mention of monster uk.co.uk. A more detailed search link: URL is a bit less impressive at 5600. All these statistics may be very interesting to people working in SEO and online marketing, but to you as a recruiter are they going to get you the candidates that you need, simple answer is no. If we get a bit more specific about our recruitment needs as the majority of recruiters needs are very specific, we are looking for a sales manager for a UK bank. What would this person search for when looking for a jobsite, (this of course only gives you access to active candidates) perhaps they would search for "sales jobs" or "banking jobs" or even "sales manager jobs in banking" as people often search for exactly what they are looking for. So where does Monster uk come under each of these searches, for "sales jobs" it does not appear on the front page, either in the natural ranking or in the pay per click sponsored advertising. Next I carry out the search for "banking jobs" and I get a result monster uk is 9th in the search results, not bad. So I click on the link as if I am the banking sales manager, ready to do my search for sales management roles in banking, I select London from the location search box and now I go to select the job category and the closest match to retail banking that I work in, is retail customer service and hit the search button. The results are for junior cashier roles and for general retail sales jobs not in banking, I as the jobseeker am so impressed that I close my browser and go back to work. Finally we test monster against the search phrase "sales manager jobs in banking" and yet again monster is not on the front page. So Monster Jobs is not for us in this example, what you really need is a sales recruitment jobsite that is going to attract and retain the details of the candidates that you need. The question is does such a jobsite exist? We will explore this together further in the next article in the series.

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