Who's looking for jobs?

A couple of newsletters prompted me to do some research and thus, write this blog post.  Do you ever check to see who is looking for jobs or what jobs people are looking for?  I did that today and I was very surprised by what I found.  Monster puts out a list every year about the top 50 job searches done that year.  I found several lists.

Jobs.com provides a list of the top 99 job searches.  This list provided me with information like sales, manager, part time, marketing, management, customer service, entry level, project manager, engineer and accounting are the top 10 job searches performed.  Sales doesn't surprise me. Neither does manager.  What I am surprises at is engineer and project manager.  Also on that list are many information technology type jobs.  

Do you know what types of jobs your jobseekers are looking for?  Does your job descriptions reflect "industry-relevant" keywords for your talent to find you.  The best way to ensure you have the best search engine optimization is to make sure your job postings have good strong keywords in them.  Teach your jobseekers to include a keyword rich resume or work descriptions.  

Now for the punch in the gut.  In the past 48 hours people searching for jobs ranked 215 out of 500.  Job search lost out to barbecuing, Facebook, hotels, Walmart & Michael Jackson.  Does this tell us that people are putting their job searches on hold for the summer?  Looks like it.

Using This Time to Become Strategic

This week I was asked by my company (Jobscience) to facilitate webinars on advising recruiters to become more strategic during this economic slow down.  We asked the attendees what changes were their HR leaders making in their function now that hiring freezes, reductions in force and budget cuts seem to be the norm.  I was shocked that very few of these recruiters were actually taking the time to prepare for the labor shortage once the economy turns the corner.  It isn't because the industry is not telling them to prepare.  But much like the corner prophets warning for the end of the world go unheeded so is the advice of the wise recruitment consultants and teachers.

What should you be doing during this time.  Here are a few suggestions that I've picked up during my recent readings and webinars:

• Make sure your website or at least your career site is optimized for the jobseeker who searches opportunities using Google, Yahoo, etc.
• Start now by developing talent communities and establishing relationships with those passive and active candidates to call on later.
• Make a genuine effort to partner with your hiring managers and/or customers to understand their needs.
• Clean up your job descriptions and make the worthy of a look by the jobseekers.
• Populate your descriptions and career site with key words that matter.

If you don't take this time to prepare for the future you will find yourself at the bottom of the food chain wondering what happened.