Once you land a job interview, you may feel the hard work is done. You might even allow your enthusiasm to melt your inhibitions during the meeting. Don’t let your excitement rob you of a chance for the job you've been waiting for. Arm yourself with these key interview strategies that include practicing restraint as well as excellent preparation.

Outrageous

Don’t ask about salary.

· This question shifts the focus to what you want for yourself as opposed to the value you will provide to the company.

Don’t ask about the timeframe for hiring decisions.

· Every candidate wants to know the answer to this question but asking it can make you seem desperate or anxious for results. Most companies look for candidates able to separate personal from professional demands.

Don’t ask what the company does.

· Conducting research on corporate initiatives is easily accomplished online. Do your homework to impress hiring managers.

Don’t ask about typical promotion policies.

· Rushing ahead to promotions may make the interviewer question your judgment and understanding of appropriate business interactions.

Don’t ask about on-the-job training for basic skills.

· Emphasize the skills you bring, not the deficits about which you are concerned.

Don’t speak ill of former employers.

· Talking about how much you hated your former workplace or employer is a top interview “don’t!”

Don’t forget basic manners.

· Offer a handshake to “seal the deal” when you leave. Thank the interviewer for their time and express your pleasure in meeting him or her.

Acceptable

Do debrief after the interview.

· Take a few minutes to review on your own what went well and what could be improved. If appropriate, include additional clarification about your skills in a follow-up thank-you note.

Do express interest in the company’s initiatives.

· Show off what you’ve researched about this company prior to the interview by linking your skills and work history to corporate projects.

Do speak positively about prior workplaces.

· It can be tempting to bring up negative attributes about employers or co-workers, but this is not the time to identify that as your reason for leaving. Focus on more positive reasons for leaving which might include a need to reach your full potential or to seek out new opportunities for growth.

Do use every phone or email contact as if it were part of the interview.

· Essentially every contact is part of the screening process. Practice what you want to say so you are prepared for the unexpected call. For some people, it helps to stand while talking to convey a greater presence or sense of personal power.

Do prepare for the interview.

· Compile a number of job history anecdotes that exemplify your strengths and help you respond readily to interview questions.

Do end the interview on a positive note.

· Say something like, “Thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today. My talents and experience represent an asset to your organization and I would be a committed member of your team.”

Solid preparation for the interview will help you avoid asking ridiculous questions. Feeling too comfortable in an interview almost never produces good results. Practice how you want to perform in the job interview just as you would for an important sports event and you will find yourself in the winner’s circle!

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GetInterviews.com is the country's leading resume writing firm. The staff’s credentials include being cited by JIST Publications as one of the "best resume writers in North America," quoted as a career expert in The Wall Street Journal, and published in a whopping 25+ career books. All Resume Writers are Certified Professional Resume Writers. Since 1994, their expert team has written 150,000 resumes specializing in 95 fields. GetInterviews.com offers a free resume evaluation and their services come with a wonderful guarantee -- interviews in 30 days or they'll rewrite for free.

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• Manage the work of the Digital Media Supervisors, Digital Media Planners and Digital Associate Media Planners providing leadership, ongoing feedback, effective motivation, performance evaluation, career direction and training of staff members
• Develop, present, implement and optimize interactive media plans and strategies to meet client's marketing objectives
• Plan interactive strategy in tandem with traditional media planning teams
• Utilize available interactive media planning tools (ie. comScore, Forrester and other industry research, client’s historical media activity reports) to develop interactive media plans
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 Register Now

Webinar Registration In this 60 minute FREE webinar you will learn the overview of the Job Seeking Bootcamp Series and why you should attend our upcoming paid webinars.

In this session learn the secrets that recruiters don't want you to know. We will cover job seeking hidden tactics such as

* Effective Networking
* Applying Directly To Hiring Managers
* How Recruiters Search & Find Resumes
* Hidden Jobs

Learn about these and more in the Job Seeker Bootcamp Overview

Presented by Jason Gorham

Jason Gorham Bio

In tough economic times companies are having a difficult time paying IT staffing company’s fees of 20-25% of a candidate’s first year salary. Sharkstrike is now offering a reduced staffing placement fee of only 15% of the candidate’s first year salary. This is a substantial savings of 10-15% of traditional staffing agency fees. Sharkstrike's Flat Fee Recruitment product now allows companies to utilize our service to receive quality IT employees at a fraction of the cost of most IT staffing agencies.

“The utilization of our patented recruitment marketing advertising platform allows us to maximize technology to capture quality candidates.” This technology is the reason why we are able to offer such a reduced placement rate,” said Jason Gorham CEO of Sharkstrike. “In addition to utilizing our own technology we also use multiple channels including Social Networking Sites, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Competitive Intelligence Sourcing and our own niche job boards.”

About Sharkstrike

Founded in 2003, Sharkstrike LLC, the world’s leading passive candidate strategy and its patent pending Push Posting human resources search engine marketing product helps companies increase their passive candidate capture strategy. By employing Sharkstrike Smart Recruiting techniques companies can reduce their cost per applicant and hire and established a repeatable process for success. Clients include Home Depot, General Dynamics, Microsoft, eBay, Motorola, Hewitt Associates, Eclipsys, Apex Systems and others. For more information, visit http://www.sharkstrike.com or contact sales at sharkstrike.com.

Here are the top 5 reasons why I believe that Amazon is flushing their money down the Google Adwords toilet. Most recruitment marketing companies are new to ppc and offer it as its new and exciting. However they usually have some kid out of high school managing the campaign and using the keyword tool to bid on the highest keyword and then telling their client what great traffic they have been sending to their website. Traffic is great but if you don’t get any applications who really cares.

Let’s take a look at what they are doing wrong. Here is the ad that we will be discussing.

1. Geo-Targeting

Adwords allows you to target your ad to anyone around the world. The tool is so powerful that you can serve an ad to your neighbor or to china. You can see in red that I’m located in Boynton Beach and I’m receiving this ad. However you can see by the image below there are no jobs located in Florida? The ad didn’t state anything about relocation so the click itself was a waste of money.

2. Landing Page

After I click on the ad looking for a java developer I land on a ICIMS page with a search button for all jobs on all continents that Amazon does business in or has locations in. What??? I wanted to apply for a java developer job where is the job I was interested in? I can almost guarantee you that if you had analytics on this page you would see the bounce rate (the amount of people that arrive and leave this page) is extremely high. Why send traffic and make someone search?

3. The Ad/Value Proposition

The advertisement says Develop Your Future at Amazon. It got my attention so I click on the ad and it sent me to a job search. What about my future with Amazon? You’re just sending me to look for a job when I should know why I should be working for Amazon. Shouldn't this be the branding page about Amazon why people love working their all that fun jazz?

4. Speed

Now that I have paid for my click and sent my potential job seeker to a search engine to find a job, hopefully they will actually apply. However now comes the applicant tracking system process. The job seeker that just saw your ad has to complete 4 steps just to apply for a job? Why do I need to create an account, I don’t want an account I want a job? You have just created another obstacle to getting a potential great applicants information by having them fill so many pages out.

5. Conversion Tracking

The most import piece of information of any successful ppc recruitment marketing campaign is conversion tracking. Conversion tracking tells us how many people applied to what job using what keyword. I can tell you that there is no conversion tracking on the thank you page, as most applicant tracking systems won’t put this type of code on their pages. So by just this action alone means that the whole ppc campaign is a complete waste of money. Without this data how do you know what’s working and what’s not working? You don’t as you can’t measure any results.

In conclusion if anyone from Amazon is reading this post. Stop your campaign immediately and start asking your recruitment advertising company why they are wasting your money. Or it’s much simpler to call us so that you know it’s going to be handled right!!!!

Sharkstrike has been in the recruitment marketing business since 2004 but I guess I never really looked at it this way.  To me I'm just trying to capture the right candidate for the right job.  However in order to do this you have to get the word out about your job, so I guess this transmission of my message to candidates would be considered recruitment marketing.  I guess the real question is what's the delivery method for this transmission and what is this message conveying to capture these people.  

First let's take a look at the multiple delivery methods to get this message out.    

• SEM/PPC Recruitment Marketing      

Wikepedia defines pay-per-click marketing as the following:

Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the hosting service when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.

Of course I'm going to start with my favorite as I'm biased on this, having created a patent on the product Push Posting.  

Our Job PPC system performs the following: SharkStrike parses the job description for contextually relevant keywords, including those your competitors are using. SharkStrike creates the job-ad and manage it across multiple pay-per-click platforms domestically and internationally.  The ad placement is geo-targeted nationally and highly targeted to where your potential candidates spend time online.

PPC is a very effective way to target candidates around the world.  We can even target your competitors utilizing their names in keywords.  In one instance we were working with Home Depot and used the keywords "Lowes jobs" in search engines.  When someone would type this into Google they would also see Home Depot jobs and apply to them as well.  It's a great way to target, brand and capture quality candidates.  Google makes 80% of their revenue through ppc, why do you think their stock is at $548.00.

• Job Posting Distribution

Job posting distribution is a great way to get all your jobs posted to multiple sources.  It gives your brand and jobs more exposure the more sites that you distribute to.  The downside of this method of recruitment marketing is that you're going to get a lot of applications and candidates.  A better way to pin-point your job distribution would be to target very niche job boards for your roles.  

• Email Recruitment Marketing

Email is a very fast and effective way to communicate your jobs.  However you want to make sure that you have the right subject line to make sure your emails will get opened.  I get a lot of job emails because of my resume being posted from years past and not one of them matches my skill-set.  The reason this is has to do with the way recruiters utilize the search functions from resume databases.  The search function just finds a keyword and they put that resume into a folder and then email everyone in the folder.  Just because I have teradata in my resume doesn't make me a teradata programmer.  In order to target your people more effectively  you should use a more refined search to make sure you are emailing the right people.  If you conduct a lot of email marketing make sure that you are conducting split testing with different messages and know what the email metric terms mean.  

• Job Search Engine Optimization Recruitment Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Job SEO is a great way to get your site and jobs in front of candidates while lowering your cost. SEO doesn't cost you every-time that a candidate clicks on your link and will save you thousands of dollars compared with PPC.  However SEO is time consuming, it's just not as easy as putting some tags on your site.  Here are just a few things that you will need to know about SEO:

BackLinking

On-Page Optimization

Off-Page Optimization

Content Creation

Page Rank

SEO is an art not a science.  The search engines continually change their algorithms which will change your rankings, not to mention competitors that change their pages to increase their SEO rankings.  If your not ranking in the top 3 in search your not going to get the most out of your traffic.  

Here is an example of how we are #1 in search

This concludes our first part of recruitment marketing what does it all mean.  In part II we will explore other options on how to increase your recruitment marketing brand, recruitment marketing awareness and put yourself in-front of the right audience.  

“We are excited to have a partner like Broadbean to help deliver better candidates for both of our customers,” said Jason Gorham, CEO of Sharkstrike. “Our Broadbean partnership makes it seamless for recruiters and human resources professionals to post jobs directly to pay-per-click marketing on search engines and content sites, utilizing Sharkstrike’s patented technology Push Posting™ (US Patent number 7,653,567). Hiring pros don’t have to understand ppc; we handle everything from ad creation, bid management, quality score and much more. Not only can users advertise jobs in the United States, but we can also serve job ads around the world.”

Kelly Robinson, CEO and Founder of Broadbean states, “Our partnership with Sharkstrike quickly aligns us with the latest ppc technology to benefit candidate sourcing and online recruiting. This relationship also allows us the continued provision of the best technology to our clients. We look forward to sharing this space.”

“The Sharkstrike partnership is further representation of our promise to always look out for our clients. It means everything to us when partners agree to a relationship that will not only be mutually beneficial but assist our clients and potential clients in their daily jobs: sourcing and recruiting the best using the fastest and easiest methods. Simply, our job is to make a recruiter’s job easier,” continued Rayanne Thorn, marketing Director at Broadbean.

About Sharkstrike
Sharkstrike’s patented Push Posting™ job posting pay-per-click marketing technology (US Patent No. 7,653,567) helps companies recruit faster by targeting online job seekers where they spend time online. Our innovative recruitment solutions — including Push Posting™ and our job keyword extraction and recommendation engine — represent recruiting technology at its best. We believe in partnering with our clients to maximize your recruiting efforts while minimizing your recruiting budget.

About Broadbean Technology
Broadbean is the leader in providing sourcing tools that help recruiters improve efficiencies, increasing ROI. Our software makes it easy to search for talent online and distribute jobs, while optimizing recruitment processes with internal systems’ integration. Broadbean analytics provide insight on the most successful channels, as well as metrics to increase effectiveness, ultimately lowering recruitment costs.

With 30,000 users worldwide, Broadbean is good at getting it right. Reach as many candidates as possible. Understand what that reach means. Get the answers needed to determine effective job board spend. Streamline the online recruitment process. Reach. Understand. Determine. Streamline. It’s that simple. http://www.Broadbean.com

Contact:
Rayanne Thorn
Broadbean Technology
rayanne@broadbean.com

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If your considering changing your current applicant tracking system or purchasing a new applicant tracking system than you need this report.  This independent report was by created by a National Sourcing Director for a Fortune 500 company in December 2008. 

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Thursday, September 30, 2010 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT

Join SharkStrike & Pure Discovery To Learn How To Utilize Semantic Search Keywords To Source More Passive Candidates.

Featuring: Jason Gorham CEO SharkStrike & Earl Mann Consultant Pure Discovery

In this FREE 45 minute webinar you will learn the following:

* What Is Semantic Search?
* Why Is Semantic Search Important?
* How To Build Effective Keyword Lists For Sourcing Resumes
* Why SharkStrike's Keyword Recommendation Tool Makes Resume Sourcing Easy!

Register: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/666956750

Have we all gone mad, yeah we all know how much search volume Facebook is getting, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go out and create a brand new title and category for this. Now we even have conferences dedicated to Social Media Recruiting. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s all a big lie. I recently had a conversation with a respected sourcer in the industry and just to see how crazy I really am. As I began saying that this whole thing didn’t exist, and before I could finish she is already shaking her head. Maybe it’s cool to say it and maybe all the newbies in recruiting love it but guess what it doesn’t exist.

By now I hope I have your attention and you maybe saying to yourself hey Jason you have a social media recruiting service listed on your website. The answer to this is yes, it’s not that I believe the hype but to be able to sell the service I have to use those words (oh yeah and we also do it to increase our SEO rankings to get more clients.) So now I’m going to reveal to you why there is no such thing as social media recruiting.

When I started in recruiting back in the day my title was Technical Recruiter. It wasn’t social media recruiter or a resume database recruiter or even a open web recruiter. So why should we now be designating conferences, titles etc for social media recruiting. The net-net result is that social media is a tool not a function. You would utilize social media tools to recruit, just like you would use Google, internal resume databases, job board resume databases, Linked name sourcing and the list goes on and on. As these are considered tools, software, technology, and websites I don’t think that we should start classifying them as individual skill sets.  If we do head down this path than let’s do just that.

That would mean a real Social Media Recruiter would be purely that. It would be mean that you never leave Social Media. Your ats (applicant tracking system) is built on social media, all of your interaction is done on social media sites, all jobs posted or listed are done on social media, and 100% of your hires come from social media.

So spending so much time on social media means the following:

· No job posting to job boards/open web
· No use of ats (applicant tracking systems) unless they are only social media ats’s.
· No use of resume databases either internal or external

There is one source of hire/tool that I have omitted here which is the highest source of hire to date. It’s a source that is truly considered social networking (notice that I didn’t say social media because social media doesn’t really exist either). The source of hire that I speak about is employee referrals. Employee referral is the one true social networking tool that is our biggest asset to date. So if you really want to make your social networking program a success stop spending so much time on Twitter, and start walking around your company and ask employees who they may know for open positions.

So I ask you. Does Social Media Recruiting really exist or are they just tools that we use to recruit?

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued Patent number 7,653,567 to SharkStrike CEO Jason Gorham

We are very excited that the patent has been awarded and reinforces our intellectual property portfolio.  The patent has taken over six years to be awarded and is a major accomplishment for us. Said Jason Gorham.   

The present invention provides an easy to use system and method for assisting job seekers in locating job opportunities and applying for the same using an online connectivity protocol which is simple to use and highly efficient in terms of time consumption. The system identifies and extracts keywords from the job postings in an accessible job database to create a keyword targeted list that excludes common words and phrases. The keyword targeted list is then processed to form a keyword targeted prefix list which in turn is inserted into a search engine. Upon appropriate query by a potential job seeker, the search engine returns its results while giving prominent placement to one or more job postings sponsored by a recruiter. An interested job seeker clicks on the sponsored job posting is directed to the job details through a website mediated application programming interface.

Being a pioneer in the recruitment pay-per-click marketing field allows us to offer our customers a patented technology that no other vendor can offer.  We have worked diligently to lead the market place into the job posting search engine marketing world.  “The patent award allows us to open up licensing talks with licensee’s in order to generate more revenue.”    

About Sharkstrike LLC 

Sharkstrike LLC delivers a complete range of online and offline recruitment and recruiting services to help companies enhance their total recruitment process.
Our innovative recruitment solutions and online imperatives represent recruiting technology at its best.  We believe in partnering with our clients to maximize your recruiting efforts while minimizing your recruiting budget. 

We have leveraged our considerable business experience to develop a tried and tested methodology that ensures clients follow a low risk path to success.

press@sharkstrike dot com or (561) 401-0720 or visit http://www.sharkstrike.com

The concept may not be so far-fetched. That's largely due to the rise of search engine marketing and search engine optimization in recruiting. (SEO refers to free, "organic" or "natural" listings that predominate on the main part of search pages; SEM includes the small paid ads usually above and to the right of the organic results.) Taken together, they could become more popular as job-search tools than traditional jobs boards within several years. A newspaper editor might Google up a replacement copy editor without having to advertise on Monster.com; writers could land their next gig without having to slog through dozens of different job boards....

Candidates and recruiters fire up search engines

Though still small -- SEM accounted for just 3 percent of hires among Fortune 500 companies surveyed by the career consulting company CareerXroads last year -- search is growing -- up from just 1 percent in 2007. What's more, job boards have peaked, according to the same study, plateauing at 12 percent for the last several years. Recruiters and employers told the study's authors, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, that they'll incorporate more Web searches into their recruitment strategies as they push to find better candidates on their own rather than sifting through thousands of resumes from often unqualified candidates that pour in from job boards. Search, according to Crispin, could have a devastating effect on job boards and eventually "disintermediate" job boards.
Crispin isn't alone in his predictions. "I would say that search is still in its infancy," said Joel Cheesman, self-described "head cheese" at the influential recruiting blog. "But I do think the number's going to go up."
Indeed, a lot of people are in the search pool already. Google Analytics reported nearly 300 million job-related searches in the U.S. in September. Among the reasons for search's increasing popularity among recruiters and employers, according to Cheesman and other recruiting-industry experts:

It's often cheaper than advertising on traditional job boards.
Return on investment tends to be better, in that it can yield more and better job candidates per dollar invested.
While search helps a company find candidates, it's also providing brand exposure while the company hunts employees on the Internet.
Search, in particular SEM, could be a good way to hook highly sought-after passive candidates -- those potential employees who aren't necessarily looking for a job but who might be tempted into taking one with a well-crafted SEM campaign that catches their eye while they're researching industry-related keywords. Rank-and-file recruitment

There are plenty of potential benefits for job-seekers too, according to the experts. Search-engine job hunting offers one-stop shopping; a candidate can find bunches of jobs in one search rather than roaming around dozens of job boards. They can refine their search by pinpointing keywords.
Still, that doesn't mean that job-seekers can easily Google a gig right now. Basically, the job boards have a lock -- for the moment at least -- on top rankings in job-related search results on the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
"Currently most job posts don't get indexed with a search engine," said Alison Engelsman, senior strategist at Shaker Recruitment Advertising & Communications. "So if a candidate's looking for related information and they type in, for instance, nursing jobs, the first results they're going to see, probably three pages deep, are from job boards." That's a big problem, she added, because most Web users don't bother to drill down past the first page of search results.

Thus, most won't get real-time job postings with a Web search. A few years ago Google tried to launch a more traditional job vertical, called Google Base, which would have offered up more postings, but it flopped; recently it's been experimenting with Google Profiles, which is more like social and career networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook than traditional job boards.
For job-seekers who want to use search to cut right to live postings, experts like Engelsman and Cheesman say, the best option is to use big job aggregators -- also called vertical search engines -- like SimplyHired and Indeed. These aggregators scrape job postings from multiple job boards and post them on their own sites, where they can be searched in all sorts of ways by people looking for work. Like the big search engines, such sites make part of their living by selling SEM ads that run alongside the free postings.
Job boards' domination of organic search results could change, Engelsman said, as emloyers learn to use SEO to move their Web sites higher in search results. Ultimately, she said, companies with good SEO could cut out job boards as the middlemen for recruitment because they'll be able to get their own corporate job sites on the first page of search results.
And there are plenty of companies, including well-known names like Jobs2Web, that are very willing to help businesses get their sites noticed in the Web's ever-expanding information universe. But SEO isn't cheap. It costs about $10,000 for a company to get its site optimized. Even then, there's no guarantee that it will rise to the first page. The very fluidity of the Web, with sites and algorithms constantly changing, ensures that rankings will change daily, even with the best SEO, and that further investments in SEO may be needed to stay near the top of the rankings.

 
SEM vs. SEO: Do paid ads pay?
SEM offers a much more conservative approach for employers. Because it's a paid ad, it's guaranteed to show up on a page with the corresponding keyword. Advertisers set limits on what they'll spend, and the cost per candidate usually is lower than the traditional "post and pray" method of listing a job on an employment site -- though that could change. SEM's ad cost is determined in auctions, and the price of good keywords could rise as SEM becomes more popular.

Good keywords aren't always that easy to find, either, and subtle changes can make a big difference. Jason Gorham, CEO of Sharkstrike, which helps companies with SEM, SEO, social networks, and candidate sourcing, said that one campaign for entry-level jobs got far more clicks and conversions for entry-level jobs with a hyphen than for entry-level jobs without one. He's still not sure why. "There's a human factor in search," he said. Finding the right keyword, or combination of keywords, is as much art as science, but it's a crucial exercise for search. "There's so much noise right now that if you're not standing out in the space, then you're lost," he said.

Trolling for top candidates
Search also presents some unusual tactics for employers: the potential to poach employees from other companies, for example. "I can serve a job ad to somebody who works at The New York Times because I can see their IP address and say, OK, this person works at The New York Times, and I can serve them a Washington Post ad," Gorham said. It's a hypothetical example, though Gorham's done the real thing with competitors like Home Depot and Lowe's.
In similar fashion, Cheesman pointed out, employers can use SEM on sites like Facebook to troll for employees who work for competitors. "If I know that USA Today has people that I, The New York Times, want to hire, I can actually target them via my Facebook advertising and say, hey, jobs at The New York Times, come and check out what a great atmosphere we have, or whatever. It's a neat kind of way to target that search engines don't really give you." Perhaps the biggest attraction search advertising could have for employers is that it could make traditional job boards almost completely unnecessary -- just as the advent of job boards in 1995 eventually made newspaper help-wanteds practically a relic.

"Hitwise did a report that said a third of Monster's traffic comes from pay-per-click advertising," Cheesman noted. "With that knowledge, you're saying, why can't I do that to drive traffic directly to me instead of using Monster as a middleman? People are putting together the dots. It's not going to happen overnight, but more and more people are getting turned on to SEO and pay-per-click."

For job-seekers, search offers a "push-pull" strategy, according to Gorham, that will outdistance perusing the postings on traditional big sites like Monster.com. "From an SEM standpoint, if you're spending time reading about your job and your industry, you'll get captured by the right keywords. In SEO, you can go and pull data from a search engine," he said. SEO tends to reel in active job-seekers who include work-related words in their searches, while SEM typically trolls for passive job-seekers researching industry-related terms. A typical SEO job-seeker might type "reporting jobs" into a search box, while a passive candidate might merely be researching a media-related topic -- proofreading or freelance writing, say -- and SEM ads will pop up with job opportunities.
So, will we all soon be Googling our way to better jobs and better workers? "Yeah," Gorham said. "The crossroads is here and now. If you were doing classified advertising with your local paper and it was working, now it doesn't exist anymore. So people will be forced into new media, whether they like it or not." 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SharkStrike CEO Jason Gorham To Present at Technology Association of Georgia Recruiting Event

ATLANTA – Jason Gorham CEO of Sharkstrike, the leading provider of passive candidate strategy, will be a keynote speaker at the Technology Association of Georgia Recruiting event held Sept

 15, 2009.   Gorham will be co-presenting with Matt Matrone on search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) for recruitment.

“I am glad to contribute. The recruiting market continues to grow at an exponential pace and the use of online tools like ours, are leading the way for a company to find the best possible candidates faster and cheaper than conventional methods” said Gorham. “I look forward to sharing industry trends, pitfalls and some of the successes we have seen in recruiting as it relates to SEM and SEO.”  

Candidates are not likely to search on a companies name to find a job as if this was the case they would just go to their website.  They are however likely to search job titles or industries and this is where companies should be focusing their HR-SEO strategy.  A lot of the HR SEO process is education and for most human resources departments this isn’t their core competency and that’s why they should select a leader the HR Search Engine Optimization (SEO) space that has a number of years of experience.  Multiple HR SEO vendors are claiming that their products are making jobs HR SEO compliant when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites and hoping that the links to the jobs will create natural or organic traffic when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites. 

About Sharkstrike

SharkStrike LLC, the world’s leading passive candidate strategy company, and its patent-pending Push Posting human resources search engine marketing product, helps companies strengthen their passive candidate capture strategy.

SharkStrike’s S^4™ passive candidate offering encompasses recruitment search engine marketing (SEM), recruitment search engine optimization (HR-SEO) social media/social networking recruiting and open web candidate sourcing.  By utilizing a combination of these smart recruiting techniques, employers lower their cost per applicant and cost per hire, enhance their employer proposition and increase brand value. These technologies also allow passive candidates to opt-in to company message/job postings, facilitating the company’s process of engaging and successfully communicating with passive candidates.

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For SEO to be effective you have to have multiple ingredients for it to work and more importantly work effectively.  What I mean by work effectively is if I were to get you a #1 ranking in Google for a keyword phrase like seattle welding jobs you would think this is effective.  However if I did keyword research on seattle welding jobs and found that the keyword volume (this is the amount of times someone searches on the keyword) has no supported data or very little data that means that no one is searching that keyword phrase.  You would be #1 in Google for a phrase that no one ever searches on which means that the SEO strategy didn’t help you at all to capture more candidates in natural search.  This is only one example of what you should be educated about when selecting an SEO vendor. 

Here are the multiple ingredients that make up a true SEO strategy and the work that goes into increasing your SEO ranking.

1. Back Links – A back link is when a website places a link to your site on theirs.  Back linking is not placing a link on your site to another.
2. Page Rank – Google measures page rank from 0-10 with 10 being the best.  You can get the Google toolbar here to see your page rank.
3. Content – Search engines love good content and the more you have the better off you will be to get pushed up in rankings.
4. Title Tags – This is the title of what the page says when you log onto it.
5. Meta Tags – Keywords that the search engine robots know how to index and your site
6. Submission – The website needs to be submitted to the search engines to find it.
7. Manual Submission – Some search engines don’t automate your submission so it needs to be done by hand.
8. Ranking Monitoring – Just because a site reaches #1 in a search engine doesn’t mean it will stay there.

These are a just few things that go into making a webpage SEO optimized.  If your considering SEO and talking with vendors make sure to ask them the above referenced questions.  You will learn a lot about what their system, product or person does and is capable of and how that’s different from just job distribution.

The new interface has a much cleaner/newer look and feel to it and it's more analytic and tends to look more now like Google analytics than it does Adwords.  The goal of the new interface is to make it easier for people like me to manage accounts quicker and more effectively as well as for beginners to understand their accounts and use the tool more often.  One of the key features that I like is the keyword search within a campaign feature.  In the past you had to run a search across all of the campaigns and then drill into the ad group to manage the keyword.  Now all you have to do is set up a filter and run your keyword search.  

The data map is much easier to read and figure out so a novice or your executive team can login and see a quick snapshot of your campaign is doing.  I also like the account tree so everything is on the left hand side of the screen and you can even look into your analytics while not having to leave Adwords. 

The new interface seems to be improvement over the old interface, but it will take some time to get used to.  With that in mind remember this, Google is a pay-per-click company the more clicks the better Google does.  A lot of people trust Google for everything including analytics for them to give them the best data, keyword searches etc.  However I leave you with this...if Adwords says it's a click and Google analytics say's it's a click is it a click?

The figure is down from the first half of 2008, when 13.2% of messages were opened.

How often e-mails were opened and clicked varied with the industry of the sender—and the size of the list.

Messages delivered to small and medium lists had higher open and click-through rates than messages delivered to lists of 1,000 or more subscribers.

Religious and spiritual organizations had the highest open rates among large lists, followed by telecommunications and travel companies.

Click-through rates for lists of over 1,000 recipients were also highest for religious e-mails, followed by travel, general consumer and retail.

“A smaller list does not directly affect open and click rates, but mailings to smaller lists may be targeted better, contain more relevant content or have more recent subscribers,” wrote the authors of the report.

“By examining the top 5 companies in the world’s careers pages we understood quite quickly that a common marketing tactic is being ignored by human resources and recruiting strategies to capture more candidates to their career portals.”  Said Jason Gorham CEO of Sharkstrike. 

“The white paper examines the application of SEO methodologies within corporate HR departments as part of their talent acquisition strategies. The paper defines SEO, discusses its use in product and service marketing, and outlines the rationale for its potential to create efficient and cost-effective avenues for attracting key talent.  Companies of Google job searches that potential job seekers conduct in order to find new placement.  Companies are spending too much money on branding big name job boards and not taking matters into their own hands to create a seamless process of candidates that can find them in Google search. Said Gorham.

“Candidates are not likely to search on a companies name to find a job as if this was the case they would just go to their website.  They are however likely to search job titles or industries and this is where companies should be focusing their HR-SEO strategy.  A lot of the HR SEO process is education and for most human resources departments this isn’t their core competency and that’s why they should select a leader the hr search engine optimization (seo) space that has a number of years of experience.  Multiple hr seo vendors are claiming that their products are making jobs hr seo compliant when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites and hoping that the links to the jobs will create natural or organic traffic when in reality they are just pushing jobs to free sites. 

To learn more about HR SEO strategies and to download the full white paper please visit http://www.sharkstrike.com

About Sharkstrike

SharkStrike LLC, the world’s leading passive candidate strategy company, and its patent-pending Push Posting human resources search engine marketing product, helps companies strengthen their passive candidate capture strategy.

SharkStrike’s S^4™ passive candidate offering encompasses recruitment search engine marketing (SEM), recruitment search engine optimization (HR-SEO) social media/social networking recruiting and open web candidate sourcing.  By utilizing a combination of these smart recruiting techniques, employers lower their cost per applicant and cost per hire, enhance their employer proposition and increase brand value. These technologies also allow passive candidates to opt-in to company message/job postings, facilitating the company’s process of engaging and successfully communicating with passive candidates.

"Angela brings a strong technology marketing background to the company that will help us craft and distribute our message across many platforms".  Said Jason Gorham SharkStrike CEO.

Angela, brings over 15 years of marketing experience to SharkStrike including working with some of the leading software technology companies in Silicon Valley.  

While working at Quova software Angela was responsible for taking IP/geo-location targeting software and introducing it to the market.  She headed up the marketing initiative including increasing the market perception of Quova to a 65% favorable market perception.   Prior to Quova Angela spent 5 years at Brio Software as the Senior Director of Worldwide Marketing helping shape the companies marketing direction.  She helped grow the companies valuation from $8M to $130M.  While at Brio Software she had 25+ direct reports including both domestic and international and was responsible for a $20M marketing budget.

Her breath of marketing background lends itself to online marketing, public relations, direct marketing, telemarketing and international marketing.  Her previous titles include: Vice President of Marketing, Senior Director of Marketing, Senior Director of World Wide Marketing and Director of Channel Marketing. 

About

SharkStrike LLC, the world’s leading passive candidate strategy company, and its patent-pending Push Posting human resources search engine marketing product, helps companies strengthen their passive candidate capture strategy.

SharkStrike’s S^4™ passive candidate offering encompasses recruitment search engine marketing (SEM), recruitment search engine optimization (HR-SEO) social media/social networking recruiting and open web candidate sourcing.  By utilizing a combination of these smart recruiting techniques, employers lower their cost per applicant and cost per hire, enhance their employer proposition and increase brand value. These technologies also allow passive candidates to opt-in to company message/job postings, facilitating the company’s process of engaging and successfully communicating with passive candidates.

For more information please visit http://www.sharkstrike.com

Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR

A professor says most human resources professionals are ill-equipped to carry out value-added workforce planning and transformation.

David McCann - CFO.com | US

March 10, 2009

Addressing a crowd of about 300 financial executives this morning, a professor of human resources soundly denounced the corporate HR profession for being mostly unable to provide analytics that are useful in making workforce decisions that build economic value.

Most companies today spend too little effort on attracting and retaining top strategic talent and too much on satisfying the rest of the employee base, asserted Rutgers University's Richard Beatty, who spoke at a general session during the CFO Rising conference in Orlando. In fact, he claimed that typical human resources activities have no relevance to an organization's success. "HR people try to perpetuate the idea that job satisfaction is critical," Beatty said. "But there is no evidence that engaging employees impacts financial returns."

Beatty based this conclusion on employee surveys done at IBM and other companies that found little relationship between job satisfaction and performance ratings. Not only is employee engagement very expensive, but "how do you know you're not satisfying a lot of people you really wish weren't there?"

To buttress his argument, Beatty presented data from a Gallup survey on the performance of about 4,500 customer service employees at an unnamed major financial firm. The survey results, which were based on customer feedback, showed that the employees who scored in the top quartile had a positive effect on 61 percent of the people they talked to. The next two quartiles registered 40 percent and 27 percent positive responses, respectively, but there were enough neutral responses that the employees' net performance was positive. The lowest quartile, however, scored a net 2 percent negative impact.

"You'd be better off had you paid these people not to come to work," Beatty said. "You'd be a lot better off if you paid them to work for your competitor." The financial firm paid about $30 million in salaries and benefits to the employees in the lowest quartile, whose performance cost the firm as much as $50 million worth of business.

However, Beatty pointed out that this kind of performance variability means there is an opportunity to build a more valuable work force. Usually in such a situation, HR professionals try to figure out what the top performers are doing right, then train the others accordingly. That is faulty thinking, insisted Beatty, who asserted that selection is a more powerful predictor of performance than training. In addition, training may not be the problem - some employees may know what to do, but choose not to do it, opined the professor.

"HR wants to treat most employees the same way, and they spend considerable time trying to defend or fix poor performers, taking on the St. Bernard role," he said. "Low turnover isn't necessarily a good thing. Think about where you might want to disinvest."

Human resources is also behind what Beatty called the "silly" idea that a company should try to be the "employer of choice." If you are the employer of choice, he asked rhetorically, who's going to be applying for your jobs? "Everybody and their dog's brother," he said. "You want people who are excited, enthused, and understand how to contribute to what you do, as opposed to those who simply want to find a good place to hide out."

Beatty said that it is most important to think outside the HR department box when it comes to filling the strategic positions that create the bulk of a company's value. To that end, he suggested that companies might be better off appointing someone from outside the HR department to manage strategic talent. He pointed to Precision Castparts Corp., a $7 billion machine-parts manufacturer, as one company that has bypassed HR in several situations. For one, it reassigned an operations executive who ran a third of the company's 150 plants to take control of scouting for and retaining strategic talent.

Such tactics are warranted because while "the language of organizations is numbers, HR isn't very good at data analytics," Beatty said. "They don't think like business people. Many of them entered human resources because they wanted to help people, which I'm all for, but I'm also for building winning organizations."

It's the CFO's job to make sure that the work of analyzing and, as necessary, reconstituting the work force gets done by someone qualified to do the job, added Beatty, and there has never been more at stake than there is now.

"The labor market is in a position to provide you with better talent than you have ever had," said Beatty, co-author of the new book, The Differentiated Workforce. "If you don't emerge from this market with better talent in the roles that really make a difference, I don't think you're trying."

Are iPhones Good for Advertising?

Young, hip and ad-friendly.

The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.

Applying a complex equation to a basic human-resource problem is pure Google, a company that made using heavy data to drive decisions one of its "Ten Golden Rules" outlined in 2005.

Edward Lawler, director of the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, said Google is one of a few companies that are early in taking a more quantitative approach to personnel decisions.

"They are clearly ahead of the curve, but a lot of companies are waking up to the fact that there is a lot of modeling that can provide you with critical data on human capital," Mr. Lawler said.

The move is one of a series Google has made to prevent its most promising engineers, designers and sales executives from leaving at a time when its once-powerful draws -- a start-up atmosphere and soaring stock price -- have been diluted by its growing size. The data crunching supplements more traditional measures like employee training and leadership meetings to evaluate talent.

Google's algorithm helps the company "get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave," said Laszlo Bock, who runs human resources for the company.

Concerns about a talent exodus have revived in recent weeks amid the departures of top executives, including advertising sales boss Tim Armstrong and display-advertising chief David Rosenblatt. Meanwhile, midlevel employees like lead designer Doug Bowman, engineering director Steve Horowitz and search-quality chief Santosh Jayaram continue to decamp to hot start-ups like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.

As Seen In The WSJ.

By SCOTT MORRISON 

Current and former Googlers said the company is losing talent because some employees feel they can't make the same impact as the company matures. Several said Google provides little formal career planning, and some found the company's human-resources programs too impersonal.

"They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged," said Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley personnel consultant who has worked with former Google employees. "If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn't be losing all these people."

Google spokesman Matt Furman said the chance to contribute to "constant and often amazing innovation" keeps employees engaged. The company is determined to retain top product managers and engineers.

Google wouldn't say how many people have left, but says it has managed to hang on to its most important staffers. "We haven't seen the most critical people leave," Mr. Bock said.

NEW YORK Staffers at The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday were given a newly compiled list of rules for "professional conduct," which included a lengthy guide for use of online outlets, noting cautions for activities on social networking sites.

In an e-mail to employees, Deputy Managing Editor Alix Freedman wrote, "We've pulled together into one document the policies that guide appropriate professional conduct for all of us in the News Departments of the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch. Many of these will be familiar."

Dow Jones spokesman Robert Christie declined to comment to E&P today on why the updated rules were put out at this time, saying they speak for themselves. But it is clear they are in place for those involved in social networking on the likes of Facebook or Twitter, requiring editor approval before "friending" any confidential sources.

"Openly 'friending' sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex," the rules state, adding, "don't disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage," and "don't engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work -- no matter how rude or provocative they may seem."

The entire list of rules for online behavior is below, followed by the other rules of conduct included in the recent e-mail.

**************************************************

Online Activities

The use of social and business networking sites by reporters and editors of the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch is becoming more commonplace. These ground rules should guide all news employees' actions online, whether on Dow Jones sites or in social-networking, e-mail, personal blogs, or other sites outside Dow Jones.

* Never misrepresent yourself using a false name when you're acting on behalf of your Dow Jones publication or service. When soliciting information from readers and interview subjects you must identify yourself as a reporter for the Journal, Newswires or MarketWatch and be tonally neutral in your questions.
* Base all comments posted in your role as a Dow Jones employee in the facts, drawing from and citing your reporting when appropriate. Sharing your personal opinions, as well as expressing partisan political views, whether on Dow Jones sites or on the larger Web, could open us to criticism that we have biases and could make a reporter ineligible to cover topics in the future for Dow Jones.
* Don't recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work.
* Consult your editor before "connecting" to or "friending" any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly "friending" sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.
* Let our coverage speak for itself, and don't detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
* Don't discuss articles that haven't been published, meetings you've attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you've conducted.
* Don't disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.
* Don't engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work -- no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.
* Avoid giving highly-tailored, specific advice to any individual on Dow Jones sites. Phrases such as "Travel agents are saying the best deals are X and Y..." are acceptable while counseling a reader "You should choose X..." is not. Giving generalized advice is the best approach.
* All postings on Dow Jones sites that may be controversial or that deal with sensitive subjects need to be cleared with your editor before posting.
* Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.


Outside Activities

Generally, outside activities performed on news employees' own time are fine, provided that they are consistent with the Code of Conduct, conform to the more specific criteria discussed below and don't become so time-consuming that they compromise the employee's performance. No outside activities are allowed that would aid a competitor to Dow Jones, or pose a risk to our news properties, such as by hurting their reputations, exploiting their names, or diminishing our journalists' access to news sources. Outside activities performed all or partly on the job, or that require a leave of absence, may be done only with the approval of the managing editor. A proposed activity will be viewed more favorably if it:

* Complies with the criteria for personal-time activities listed above and the more specific points laid out below;
* Promises to benefit our news properties enough to offset, at least partly, the lost time of the staffer involved. These benefits may include bringing credit to the Journal, Newswires or MarketWatch and rewarding staffers for their sustained contributions; and
* Is endorsed by the staff member's supervisor.

What follows is a discussion of the principal categories of outside activities for news employees of the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch:

Freelance Writing

News employees shouldn't undertake freelance writing either for publications that compete substantially with any Dow Jones news properties, or on a topic of core interest to readers of our news properties. Any ideas or story topics generated while reporting for Dow Jones are the property of Dow Jones. Similarly, any articles reported for our publications but ultimately not published are also the property of Dow Jones. Before shopping any such ideas or articles to any other publications, news personnel must obtain the approval of the managing editor (ME), the deputy managing editor in charge of ethics (DME-Ethics) or their designated senior editor. Anyone writing a freelance piece who wishes to be identified by their Dow Jones affiliation must also get the consent of the ME, the DME-Ethics, or the appointed senior editor as is similarly provided for in the IAPE contract.

Speeches

News personnel must receive permission from their editor before accepting a speaking engagement. No honorariums or payments to the speaker may be accepted. All associated travel and lodging costs must be paid for by the Journal, Newswires or MarketWatch.

Television and Radio Appearances

We encourage television and radio appearances by news personnel of the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch. However, supervisors still need to approve appearances by individual reporters and editors, and will do so based upon a number of factors, including:
* Whether the person is sufficiently experienced and knowledgeable about the anticipated subjects to reflect creditably on Dow Jones;
* Whether the person will be called on to pose questions and report information, or whether the program format calls for the person to interpret news or express opinion; and
* Whether the environment of the program - its format, the other participants - is of a sort likely to reflect creditably on Dow Jones.

When in doubt, please consult with the DME-Ethics or the appointed senior editor and the Corporate Communication representative for your publication.

Appearances on the two business networks, Fox Business Network and CNBC, may be restricted by certain contractual agreements. Anyone approached about appearances on CNBC should check with the News Editor for television (Richard Taliaferro) or the Deputy Managing Editor responsible for television (Alan Murray). Anyone approached about appearances on Fox Business Network should check with Shawn Bender or Alan Murray.

Films

The motion picture rights to articles written by news staffers belong to Dow Jones. The company is prepared to entertain offers for those rights from producers or others. News employees may do paid work on motion pictures, provided that work meets the general guidelines for outside activities listed above. Dow Jones has an agent who handles movie negotiations. Anyone who receives an inquiry should direct the contact to the director of books and special projects (Rose Ellen D'Angelo).

Journalism Prizes

To avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest with our news coverage, the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch should generally enter journalism contests only if a majority of the judges in the contest are journalists or academics in journalism positions. Staff members should not enter these contests on their own without prior approval from senior editors.

When awards are offered to staff members without the Journal, Newswires or MarketWatch having formally entered the competitions, staffers should determine whether the judging passes the peer test and then get clearance from the DME-Ethics before accepting the awards or accepting any travel or other expenses involved in the award.

News personnel who are asked to judge a contest should get the permission of the DME-Ethics before agreeing to judge. If travel is required, the sponsoring organization may pick up those costs, subject to the approval of the DME-Ethics.

We’re hearing some pretty amazing statistics about Twitter these days: growth from February 2008 to February 2009 was reportedly 1382%, with the incline increasing yet further in recent months. But like many social networks, it seems many people lose steam with the service. Stat tracking firm Nielsen reports today that a full 60% of users who sign up fail to return the following month. And in the 12 months “pre-Oprah”, retention rates were even lower: only 30% returned the next month. That’s good news, to some degree: retention rates have increased over time.

But how does Twitter’s retention rate compare to Facebook and MySpace in the early days? Not well, says Nielsen:

Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out…we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

The question is, how can Twitter make sure that users stick around for the long haul? What is it about Facebook and MySpace that make them so appealing? Could it be, possibly, that finding friends on Twitter remains harder than doing so on other social networks?

UPDATE: As discussed in the comments, Nielsen is only able to measure return visits to Twitter.com: how many people set up a desktop application like TweetDeck () and continue to Tweet, but never return to Twitter.com?

1. Source Of Hire
2. Newspaper Demise
3. Data Sources
4. SEM/SEO
5. Current & Future

Click Here To Listen

Title: Some very basic natural SEO ideas

The first tab of the attached file shows a basic summary of client name withheld organic search ranking on Google by keyword.  The site seems to be ranked high for most of the obvious suspects, but tends to be ranked lower for keyword strings that include xx and "jobs," probably due to the infrequency with which these keywords appear in the site's content.  For "xxx," for example, one wouldn't client name withheld until the fifth page of search results.

Besides throwing in "xxx" or "jobs" whenever we're updating content and the words seem apt, we could try including meta keyword tags on each page.  These are invisible tags that are really only seen by search engine spiders; they're not always effective, but they can't do any harm (as long as we don't go crazy).  We could also try including meta description tags on each page, which might help improve the snippets that are displayed on Google et al. when client name withheld comes up.  Right now, for example, the client name withheld result in Google looks like this:

Hopefully, by adding a meta description tag, our result might one day look something like this :

I also thought that both user navigation and search engine indexing might be helped by shorter, clearer page titles.  Right now, for example, the title for the Salary page (seen in the upper left corner of the browser) is, client name withheld The repetition, besides looking a little silly, can make search engines think that a page is spam.  We might change the title to something like, client name withheld

The current and suggested titles by URL, plus suggested meta tags, are on the second tab of this file.  but if you get a chance to look at them, maybe they could be rolled into the next batch of changes that goes over to the website team.

Please let me know if you have any questions or other thoughts on this.

According this email it seems that it is a very simple process of just adding a couple of tags and sending changes to the web team.  This couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth.  Let’s dissect the email. 

1. .  The site seems to be ranked high for most of the obvious suspects,- What exactly is the usual suspects?  Most people think that SEO is just going into Google and typing in some keywords and then wanting to rank high for these keywords.  This is the first mistake.  Each person searches a search engine differently and in different fashions so the above mentioned tactic is flawed.  In advertising in SEM for one of our clients we found out that the keyword entry-level jobs got a better click through rate than the word entry level jobs.  A keyword that you think you want to rank high for could be great however what if no-one searches for that keyword?
2.   we could try including meta keyword tags on each page.  These are invisible tags that are really only seen by search engine spiders; they're not always effective – Wrong again about meta tags, these are very important if they aren’t important as the person states in the email then why even do it?
3. besides looking a little silly, can make search engines think that a page is spam. I didn’t know that search engines realized that pages are spam?  Spam only relates to email not web pages.  If a page is not formatted correctly the spider won’t see it or won’t crawl it, it won’t see it as spam. 

You can see from a number of statements like Hopefully…Might Be Helped…We Could Try…shows that the person that is writing the email knows nothing about HR SEO or doesn’t have enough confidence in the suggestions will actually work.  If HR SEO was that simple why do HR SEO firms get paid so much money to make their clients show up higher in search?  These are a couple of the steps that encompass HR SEO work however what about back-links, submission, semi-automatic submission and the list goes on and on.  Search engines don’t magically discover your site and then rank it high, it takes work everyday however perception is reality and in this case the client that I lost perception was that it was easy to make changes and do it themselves.  I wish them luck!