How SEO Can Improve HR Recruitment for Your Business in Malaysia

The term, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), should be fairly familiar to those of you working in the digital space — and if you aren’t, this article should be a useful starting point to help understand the benefits that proper SEO can offer to your business. 

If you’re new to the concept of SEO, it’s a fairly intuitive idea to adopt once you’ve gotten the basics right. Even if you don’t have a dedicated digital marketing team in your business, you can still use some of the tips (further below) in this article to improve your business’ digital presence. However, do note that you should already have a website setup for your business — it’s a must-have in 2022. 

Meanwhile, you might not have realised that proper SEO practices can actually help to boost recruitment efforts for your company, helping your business to achieve its HR goals for 2022. 

Whether you’re a newbie to the world of SEO, or you’re someone who already understands the basics, it’s crucial for businesses in Malaysia to leverage off the power of SEO to attract the best talents to their company. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of what you need to know. 

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Generally speaking, SEO is the process of improving your website for search engines — such as Bing, Yahoo, and of course, Google. This can be achieved by a series of tweaks or best practices, all in the name of making your website “rank” higher on search engine result pages, and basically, be more accessible to people searching for your business (or relevant search terms).

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and even Bing rely on bots that collect information from web pages all over the internet, storing relevant information about these pages and making them discoverable on search engines for consumers. The name of the game here, of course, is for your website to appear on one of the first few pages when someone searches for a specific term (such as “best HR system in Malaysia”). 

‍

The better your site’s SEO performance, the higher your site will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs) — this will eventually lead to more visitors finding your website, leading to more potential customers for your business. 

How SEO Best Practices can help to deepen the talent pool

Implementing the best SEO practices is a hugely important aspect of any successful recruitment campaign. Rather than exclusively relying on recruiters, recruitment agencies, or even the efforts of your own in-house recruitment department, SEO helps to ensure that potential talents are able to discover your job postings — or even useful information about your company and work culture — leading to targeted and free potential leads. 

Keep in mind that these potential candidates who visit job postings from organic search results will probably be more relevant to the actual job opening being advertised. Someone who searches for “Business Development Jobs in Malaysia” will probably be more likely to have more interest, and more intent for a position as opposed to someone that is simply scrolling through “all available vacancies” on a job platform. 

It’s also worth noting that SEO helps as part of your company’s overall branding strategy, and adding credibility to your website is essentially adding credibility to your business as a whole. In the digital era we live in today, your company’s digital presence is equally, if not more important than anything physical. Keep this in mind when designing recruitment strategies. 

SEO tips to get you started

The first thing you need to understand is that SEO isn’t a one-time deal. Instead, it’s an ongoing process to ensure that your website is continuously regarded by search engines as relevant — this involves the ongoing management of your pages. There’s too much to go into here, but here are a couple of general tips to get you started on improving your site’s SEO for recruitment: 

• Consistently update your site with relevant content
• Start a blog on your website 
• Research on relevant keywords
• Ensure that your site is mobile-friendly
• Set up a careers page with relevant job postings

Once you’ve managed to successfully attract the right talents to your organisation, it’ll be imperative that you continue along this digital journey by investing in the right digital HRMS to manage your organisation effectively for the digital era.