In the ever-evolving realm of recruitment, staying ahead requires more than just keeping pace – it demands the ability to anticipate and adapt to the winds of change. As we venture into the world of AI and digital changes, the recruitment landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, demanding a fresh perspective on content strategies that connect with today's candidates.
Why should your content change?
Some of these changes have been happening for a while now – so it probably won’t surprise you that 89% of job seekers search for jobs on mobile devices. That’s the basics, and if your marketing efforts aren’t focused on the mobile world yet, they should be. These shifts underscore the need for revamped content strategies that resonate with a tech-savvy, remote-ready audience. But how do you adapt the actual content?
The content you share speaks volumes about your brand and values. It's no longer enough to merely list job descriptions; candidates now seek meaningful connections. Authenticity, flexibility, and a clear understanding of work-life balance are the driving forces behind the new generation of candidates. Video content became crucial in any marketing strategy, with the average attention span dropping down to just 8 seconds. In 2022, 61% of consumers chose video content to learn about a brand or a product, and that number only skyrocketed this year. Visuals are now the pillar of any great marketing strategy. 91% of marketers already turned to it – and if you haven’t you are missing out on a massive chunk of the audience.
And then, of course, enter AI – which changed the digital world as we know it even more. It’s no surprise that AI made content production a lot easier and faster – but it also shifted the way the content is pushed to the audience, often making it harder for marketers to get noticed online.
AI-powered SEO
AI-powered SEO brought a huge amount of changes in the way SEO algorithms categorise and push your content – one of the most important changes being understanding user intent. Whilst before, keywords should have been kept short and clear, these days users can type into a search engine almost anything and get the clear result they were after. It ensures that the user gets the most relevant searches – and makes your job as a recruiter and marketer slightly harder because the quality, length, and relevance of your content need to all be upgraded. Stacking your blog post with short keywords won’t cut it anymore, as AI understands whole sentences and the purpose of your whole post – it’s not just searching for two or three specific words.
What is more, Google doesn’t just know what users typed in anymore – it also knows who they are, what they searched for before, and where they’re based. This means that, again, the content you produce needs to be a lot higher quality and more relevant if you want to rank in searches organically.
Last but not least, video – as we already mentioned, video content, especially short-form video, has been on the rise ever since the introduction of TikTok. However, visual search has also impacted the SEO – because now the algorithms can understand what your video is about, they became another vital part of Google search results.
Scannable content
With the attention span dropping so low, your typical blog post structure also has to change – nowadays, people spend an average of 37 seconds scanning the blog content before clicking off. This means that you need to structure your article in a way that allows your readers to draw key information from it in a short amount of time. Some of the key things to include would be a content summary at the top of the page, with all the main parts of your article listed. It not only helps users search for exactly what they need but also makes it easier for search engines to categorise your content.
Backlinking
Ah, the good old backlinking strategy – whilst AI might have affected a lot of the SEO, the impact of backlinks is here to stay. There is no SEO visibility without backlinks – meaning the number of other websites that are linking back to your page. It can either be because they’re mentioning your jobs or educational content – but either way, creating a backlinking powerhouse takes time and effort. See, you can’t force anyone to link to your site – which means you need to either produce high-quality content that people want to link to organically and quote your expertise (that’s where a recruitment blog comes in handy) or build personal relationships with businesses and exchanges links that way. And the truth is, for best results, you should be working on both.
When it comes to the links you include in your content, they also affect the visibility of your page – however, a lot less than backlinks. One of the most important things to remember here is the authority of the pages you link to – the higher their score, the better quality of your link. Authority determines the level of importance your page carries. Every website has its own score, from 0 to 100 – and the higher the score, the higher you’re going to rank in searches. A high authority score means your website is the go-to resource for a certain subject, is flooded with high-quality, relevant content, and has experts speaking on this subject. Linking to pages with a lower authority score than yours is a bad move – so remember to check that with a handy online tool before you publish your content including links.
