The list of successful online recruiting campaigns is growing daily. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out last week, companies are having great success recruiting off their own website. In the month of May, there were 22.9 million unique job seekers actively searching for employment, a 37% increase compared to the previous year. Companies with a properly optimized career page are seeing a 30% surge in applicants. The goal of any recruiting department should be getting qualified applicants to their career page while lowering the price-per-hire. Social Networking and optimization are two techniques that will make that happen.

Social site presence is critical, companies need to capture the vast hiring pool that utilizes sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter daily. Also, more and more applicants are searching within social site databases for leads and company information. From the job-seekers point of view, they can quickly find information about a company's culture, possible employee connections and if they're lucky ask the hiring recruiter questions. These are all options traditional job boards don't offer - a big plus for social recruiting.

Optimization is another great traffic generating technique that a company's career site needs. A properly optimized site allows the search engines to include your company in the organic results listing. If a job-seeker searches for "accounting jobs Houston, Tx" - all properly optimized sites for that search term will come up in the results field. Most ATS systems don't account for optimization, this can be overcome by enlisting the help of an SEO (search engine optimization) firm or a full-service recruitment advertising agency. Some tips for getting your site optimized were previously mentioned here.

Cutting job board costs and reaching applicants directly will save employers hundreds of thousand of dollars a year. Proper online presence will also increase brand awareness and protect a company's reputation. As online recruiting continues to evolve one thing is certain, it's here to stay; those who capture it effectively will have the advantage.

Ad Club, a full-service leader in social recruiting and traditional recruitment advertising since 1987. Please contact Rick with questions or for business inquiries: rwalsh@adclub.com