Improve Employee Recruitment with Strategy and Creativity

Our team at Green Apple is acutely aware of today’s tight labor market. We listen to reports that tell us job openings are continuing to decline. Since opening our doors in 2012, we have learned to adapt to the many changes and challenges outside our scope of influence, including shifts in the labor market. Our team quickly pivots when necessary and has applied strategic and creative thinking to the recruitment and hiring process with outstanding results. Here are a few of our top tips for finding, recruiting, and retaining employees: 

STRATEGIC AND CREATIVE RECRUITMENT 

Where to Recruit 

With much of our lives intersecting with the digital world, recruiting also needs to shift online. But rather than relying on mass online job boards, our team strives to be more intentional with where we conduct our employee searches. 

Green Apple’s current openings are shared on LinkedIn, where we can vet applicants based on their profiles and see if we share any connections. We also network with an online marketing group and post to the online job boards at our respective alma maters. Because we are products of those schools and programs, we already have a good idea of the knowledge and skill set their graduates will bring to our team. 

There is immense value in the quantity and quality of applicants we can reach online, but we still enjoy recruiting in person. We regularly attend local college career fairs to get to know potential graduates. While this helps us find talented employees, it also promotes brand awareness and fills our pipeline with potential applicants.  

Consider Unconventional Arrangements

During the coronavirus pandemic, the world discovered a new way of working. Remote work was an excellent fit for our team and allowed us to bring the best talent on board, no matter where they lived. 

More and more companies are forgoing remote work in favor of a complete return to the office. While this may be necessary for some lines of work, we found it was not for ours. Strategy and creativity can be performed anywhere and are not bound by office walls. With this in mind, Green Apple maintains a hybrid work environment. We are 100 percent remote, with available space to gather in person for meetings, brainstorming, team building, open-space working, and team collaboration. 

Ensuring a Good Fit 

So you’ve found a potential employee you think will be perfect for your job and company culture. Recruitment can be costly, so it’s important both parties are happy from the beginning. How can you ensure it’s a good match? The Culture Index can help. 

The Culture Index is an assessment that evaluates how people communicate, solve problems, and use or alter their innate traits to adjust to their work roles. It is one of the first steps in our application process to help determine if someone matches the position they applied for. The candidate will move on to the interview phase if their Culture Index indicates a match. This process helps Green Apple add the right people to our team who can best serve our clients and help reach our strategic goals. 

Join Our Marketing Team

Over the years, we’ve built a creative recruitment approach that has shaped and supported our team. If you’re looking for insights on creating a marketing team or are interested in joining our team at Green Apple, we’d love to connect. You can check out our current openings or learn about the services we can provide for your business.

A Guide to Alt Text for SEO

According to HubSpot, nearly 38 percent of results that appear on Google’s search engine results pages (SERP) are images. Essentially, when users search the web page for answers, they are met with many images in addition to the standard text results we’ve come to expect. Initially, images were identified by the file name and tags associated with them. With the rise of AI, images can now be identified and categorized using deep learning networks. As part of a healthy blogging strategy, tagging images is essential in order to make them searchable.   

This is where alt text, short for alternative text, comes into play. In this blog post, we’ll explore the purpose of alt text and how your brand can use it to optimize your ranking in a search engine algorithm. 

What is Alt Text? 

Alt text, also called alt description, alt tag, or alt attribute, is a brief sentence containing detailed information describing a webpage’s pictures. The concept was originally created to improve web accessibility for people who use a screen reader online. For example, those with visual impairments cannot see the images on a webpage, but the screen reader can relay the image description, resulting in a better user experience. Alt text is also helpful in filling in the blanks when images do not display because a webpage does not load properly. 

How Does it Improve SEO?  

Alt text has quickly become a best practice when it comes to SEO. In addition to improving the user experience, alt text improves search engine optimization. When a user searches a topic on Google, web crawlers scan the internet for the most relevant information to display in search results. Web crawlers also scan text descriptions of photos—and skip over those without alt text. 

Including relevant descriptions of your photographs, images, buttons, and other visual elements means search engines will index this content when populating results pages. 

Writing Alt Text for SEO

To write effective alt text for SEO, keep the original intent in mind: user accessibility. Although it can be tempting to use this real estate primarily for keywords, you want to be sure that your image description will make sense to someone who may not see your photo. 

For this reason, write alt text in sentence form to keep it sounding natural. The text should also be as descriptive as possible, linking the image to the context of the article. For example, for a photo of a charcuterie board, you could describe it as “a tray with meat and cheese,” but a better description might be “a round wooden board filled with assorted meats, cheese, vegetables, and fruit.” The goal is to communicate the entire visual content of a photo, picture, or illustration.

Additional best practices for writing alt text include keeping phrases to 125 characters or less. Any longer, and you risk screen readers cutting off the description mid-sentence, resulting in a frustrating user experience.        

Benefits of Using Alt Text for SEO

Using alt text as part of a greater digital marketing strategy for SEO and accessibility can also increase website traffic. As stated in the opening of this post, nearly 38 percent of Google’s search engine results are images—images that appear on the main results page! 

Because your images now have text descriptions, web crawlers can read them and include them in SERPs. As such, your content may appear in both image and text results, creating multiple avenues for visitors to find your page. 

Improving SEO means making all your content work for you, including content you have already created. If you have images on your site that do not have alt text, set aside some time to add them. Doing so could be an effective and efficient way to maximize your website’s current content and move the needle on your SEO. 

Let’s Optimize Your SEO

Green Apple Strategy offers a unique approach to helping small businesses optimize their SEO efforts. Our team would love to collaborate with you on finding goal-driven solutions that reach your audience. Contact us today to learn more.