By Will Staney, Director of Recruiting, Strategic Programs

I am delighted to share that SuccessFactors has been awarded a patent for a crucial Recruiting Marketing search engine optimization technology.

As a recruiting professional and a Jobs2Web customer for the past three years (even prior to SuccessFactors), I can tell you exactly how important this technology is to a company’s recruitment marketing strategy.

“The Job Cage”

Most companies’ jobs are found by going to their career site where candidates search in an iFrame or portal into the applicant tracking system (ATS) database. Meaning, candidates have to go directly to the career site to search for or find the job they are looking for. In this respect, I refer to the legacy ATS here as “the job cage” because it locks those jobs into one place – the career site.

The jobs are stuck in that database. Search engines and aggregators can’t pull the jobs into their results and you can’t link to them via social media, blogs and other online sources (which also increase SEO). Not to mention, “The Job Cage” makes searching the career site from a mobile device difficult, or in most cases, impossible. Applicant tracking systems are great for managing candidates through the hiring process and keeping you compliant, but they were certainly never meant to be great web marketing tools.

The Patent

This is where SuccessFactors Recruiting Marketing and the patented search engine optimization technology comes into play. Jobs2Web, acquired by SuccessFactors last year and now part of our Recruiting Execution product suite, created a unique method of handling job listings – moving them in and out of customized, dynamic ‘Talent Landing Pages’ –  that makes them specifically optimized for search engines. In other words, our software turns your jobs into SEO-optimized web pages that update automatically as you open, make changes to, or close jobs in your ATS.

Dynamic landing pages are the fastest growing driver of SEO candidate traffic. No one else has this capability, and thanks to the newly awarded patent, it is likely to stay that way. Also, keep in mind that SEO candidates are FREE, unlike candidates that come from job boards, PPC campaigns, or most other paid sources. These job listings can cost the company money for each post or each time they are clicked.

Why does this matter?

In May of 2012 there were 433 million Google searches for jobs/careers. Recruiting Marketing customers alone are getting more than 2.5 million hits per month from SEO traffic. That means there are literally millions of people looking for jobs on search engines that companies are missing out on if they’re not using our software.

Aren’t these low quality candidates?

No. Our aggregate data from customers confirms that these are the exact high quality passive candidates that most companies are looking for. Think about how most people try to find something online. Where is the first place they go? A search engine, right? It’s usually the same when searching for a job as well.

We can tell they’re good quality by the ratio of hires to hits. That ratio is much higher with SEO candidates than with other types of sources, particularly with hard to fill jobs like nurses or engineers.

In fact, on average, search engines take 32 applications to get to a hire, compared to major job boards, which take: 219

Let’s look at the following example scenario of a passive candidate:

In Mountain View, CA, a highly skilled software engineer gets fed up with her bosses’ unreasonable demands and decides to just ‘Google’ what’s out there.  She sees a couple of interesting looking jobs, and clicks on them for more info.  She is taken to a customized landing page that is targeted at her specific skill set and offered the opportunity to fill out a ‘business card’. She is not really ‘looking’ for a job, so wouldn’t fill out an application, but wants to keep track of the job, so she fills out the business card or registers with her Linkedin or Facebook profile that fills it out for her, then opts in to monthly job updates.  Six weeks later, after multiple touches, she gets notified about a job that looks like a perfect fit, and she applies and gets hired.

So there you have it. Recruiting Marketing helps companies find and build relationships with high quality candidates in a strategic way that saves the company money.

I’ll be at HR Technology Conference in Chicago next week If you’re interested in hearing more examples of how companies are putting our Recruiting Marketing technology to work (including SuccessFactors ourselves). Ask for me in Booth #511 or follow me on Twitter (@willstaney).