Recruiters should be making more use of the Google+ social network, believes one search specialist, especially since it could benefit your search marketing efforts and search engine ranking. 

Gary Elliott, search marketing manager at Evenbase, the group which owns brands such as Jobsite and Broadbean Technology, told Recruiter that Google has been transparent about the fact that Google+ activity will start to affect your performance in online search marketing more and more. “The main reason a recruiter should get on Google+ is to increase the number of social signals it gives to Google about the relevance and usefulness of its jobs content,” Elliott explained.

Social signals are such things as Tweets, Facebook Likes, Google’s +1 button or Circles, and there is considerable debate as to whether more +1s and Circles improves your ranking in searches. Elliott says that the more people who connect with and like your Google+ content, the more likely you are to see your other content — in a recruiter’s case jobs — in search results. 

Recruiters may feel that using Google+ goes against the general rule of going where your biggest audience is as it doesn’t yet have the volume of users as, say, Facebook or Twitter. But Elliott believes recruiters should make an exception in this case. “Google controls a lot of traffic for a lot of businesses and if you are reliant on web traffic, Google+ is something you shouldn’t ignore,” he said.

Elliott said recruiters should make more use of Google+ for other reasons too. He highlighted its ability to let users create different social profiles so they can keep work and their social activity separate, and it allows you to target specific groups of like-minded candidates via its Circles: “So if you are dealing with IT and engineering professionals, you can easily put two different sets of content out and have two different conversations with them.” Meanwhile, he believes its Hangout video chat service, which is available for up to 10 people, could replace telephone interviews at numerous organisations.