I just want to clarify - I didn’t trash SEO, in fact I advocated for it. My post was about services that claim to be SEO and are not. Developing a mirror site with your job postings is not SEO. That process is something more like a job posting visibility service, it gets your posting into the search engines, but often does not create traffic to the career site, where all the information about the employer is kept and where they have an opportunity to brand themselves. Often, these tools often do not improve the rankings of the actual career site. True SEO should have long-term value to the client’s career site and their candidate acquisition process. While there are reasons to use these job posting visibility services, I think HR consumers should be aware that it is not really SEO.

Laura

Now maybe I’m just the guy who survived the car crash because I *wasn’t* wearing the seatbelt–the proper term for which is “dumb luck.” But I also get to see thousands of recruiters hire candidates from job boards all the time. I’ve also spent $300 to post a really exciting, creative job description on an uber-targeted super-popular special-interest site, and got absolutely atrocious results. Do I wish I posted it on Monster or Dice instead? Well, the results couldn’t have been much worse, though I suppose a hundred bad candidates are less useful than absolutely none. This was after networking had produced not enough results.

Of course, the seven steps you propose are excellent, and probably triply valid for someone trying to ascend within an organization. I do think 6 and 7 though will be opaque to a lot of people. It’s sort of like when a chronically-single person asks a friend for advice on how to improve their dating life, and the friend says, “just be yourself!”

Basically there are two types of email item. The first is the message we receive from someone we know and recognize and the second is the item we receive from an unknown sender, the Recruiting Roadshow perhaps.

Likewise there are basically two forms of email content. The first contains information we need, want, should have or in some other way has value, currency. The other is the untimely, the irrelevant, the unwanted and the distracting.

The problem [and the payoff] is that unlike other forms of communication email is direct. It has the potential to please or pester.

On balance which you rather receive: Untimely, irrelevant, unwanted and the distracting stuff from someone you know, recognize and even trust or valuable and current information that you need or should have that is sent — unsolicited — from a perfect stranger?

The problem with bulk mail is that it is hit and miss. Some recipients will view the message as annoying others will receive it happily. The same person may respond differently on different days, who knows?

The point is that if the mailing “pays for itself” the mission has been accomplished. Collateral damage comes with the territory. If the intent of the sender is decent but the message is poorly timed how is that different from a useless piece of mail from someone we know and trust, waste that we junk without thinking twice? And, if you are immediately removed from future mailings when you ask to be isn’t that a transaction of trust?

Nice blog, John. ‘Bout time we had you back.