March 16, 2015
By Angela Rose for BioSpace
These days, most biotech professionals start their job search online. While some may navigate directly to an industry career site—such as BioSpace.com—or visit the web pages of companies they’re interested in, others type their queries into general search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These programs primarily use the words on a page to determine its topic before ranking—or ordering—it against similar content. If you want your job ads to appear in the list for job seekers to find, you need to make sure they are search engine friendly.
1. Identify your keywords.
If you were a biotech job seeker what words would you type into a search engine? An approximate job title is an obvious one. Make a list that includes common titles for the available position. Don’t bother with internal job designations unless they’re the norm in your industry. Then use a free research tool—like Google AdWord’s Keyword Planner—to generate related keyword suggestions. The software will also show you how many people actually search those terms every month. If your list is long, you can eliminate the less popular options.
You may want to brainstorm variations on your keywords as well. For example, some biotech professionals might search for “QA specialist” positions while others type in “QA specialist. Job seekers may also include a geographic location in their search so make sure you include your city and/or metropolitan area in your keyword list.
2. Write your job post title.
The title of your job post is the first place search engines look for relevant keywords. It’s also the first indication biotech professionals have of what the advertisement is about. For this reason, a straightforward title using the most commonly searched keywords for that particular position will most likely work best to land your ad in front of the right biotech job seekers. For example, if you’re hiring for an entry level administrative position in the program development department, “Administrative Assistant” or “Administrative Assistant—Program Development” are both better than “Assistant Biotech Administrator Job.”
As mentioned previously, biotech job seekers may search for positions in a particular geographical area. You could try including yours in the job title as well (i.e. “Administrative Assistant—San Francisco”). And if you’d prefer applicants with a biotech background, “Biotech Administrative Assistant—San Francisco” could be a good option. If you’re posting to a job board, it may include your location in the title automatically.
3. Work keywords into the job description.
While it’s generally best to keep job post titles relatively short, you can work more of your keywords into the job description without creating text that reads awkwardly. Choose three to five of the strongest from your list—including those in your job title—and weave them throughout the content. You don’t need to repeat each one more than two or three times. If your job description is very short, you may only want to use each keyword once. Natural places to include your keywords include the overview, position summary and company history.
4. Use keywords in tags as well.
Whether you’re posting a payroll accountant job on your biotech company’s website or advertising for a new clinical data manager on a job board, you should have the opportunity to create “tags.” These are snippets of text that don’t appear within the content (so they’re not visible to jobseekers) but within the code (where they are visible to search engines). The tag field is the perfect place to include the keywords you’ve used in your title and description as well as the ones you weren’t able to work in.
The bottom line: If you want to connect with biotech professionals who are qualified to fill available positions at your organization, you need to post search engine friendly job ads online. Determine the keywords your ideal applicant is likely to search, work them into your ad, and the right applicants will find you.
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