As a person who focuses on employer branding and recruitment marketing everyday – I get excited when I see companies doing really smart things online to build their employer brand and attract talented people.
Tonight – I came across one of the SMARTEST tactics to date, and it was by Yahoo!. Here is how it happened: I am giving a talk on Thursday called ‘Creating Great Employment Brands Online’…so I sat down and did a Google search on ‘Employer Branding’ on my new Google Custom Search Engine – popula8ion - to see what my peeps are saying about this topic. Then I did a technorati search to see if the ‘blogosphere according to technorati’ had anything else to offer me.
Here is a screen shot of the Technorati SERP and look what I found in their Sponsored Links:
Do you recognize that URL from the recruitosphere? If you don’t – that is http://www.jobsearchmarketing.com – the terrific blog by Matt Martone, a Recruitment Media Sales Executive over at Yahoo!.
My first reaction was that I couldn’t believe Matt was buying text ads on search engines to promote his blog. After all, he works for Yahoo! – what could he possibly gain personally by paying for an SEM campaign to attract readers to his blog? If you have your own business – that is one thing. But if you work for a company – what would make it worthwhile to spend your personal money like this?
I am so intrigued. So I click on his ad (sorry to skew the numbers Matt 
) – and here is what I see this time:
If you aren’t connecting the dots the way I did – the text ad on Technorati links to a specific post on Matt’s blog called – “What’s it like to work at Yahoo!“. I think that this is a recruitment marketing campaign!
Yahoo! is leveraging the fact that their employees blog and using Matt’s to recruit talent. (OR Yahoo! has a KICK ASS employee referral program and Matt IS using his own money as he is betting that he will make more money from an ERP bonus than the cost of this SEM campaign). Yahoo! is leveraging their employee bloggers to recruit talent. SO smart. I love it. The post is complete with a recruitment video that you can see here if you’re interested:
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, recruiting blogs, employer brand, employment brand, employer branding, employee blogs, recruitment marketing
EXCELER8ion is where Shannon and Julian Seery Gude write on Social Media & Recruiting, Digital Marketing, Technology, Internet Business, and other Geekiness. 
