Blogs are about a lot of things and they can help accomplish a lot of things.  As a startup company, Interview on Demand has decided to use our blog for three really important tasks.

1) One of our blog’s purposes is to trumpet the arrival of a technology, video interviewing, that will literally change the way that all businesses hire people for the better. 

2) Another purpose is to help connect people who are involved in the hiring process in a meaningful way, to give them a platform where they can connect and to enable that connection to benefit them personally and professionally.

3) Thirdly, a major purpose is to help introduce the team behind the product and company, so that people will have an easier time understanding who they are talking to when they communicate with us.

I’ll talk about all of these purposes in detail as I begin to post here on a regular basis.  But today, I wanted to talk about number two, helping people connect and gain benefit from that connection.

Not many people know a whole lot about blogs and the software behind them.  Our blog is published using WordPress, which is one of the largest and most well known of the blogging platforms.  It has a ton of helpful features and it is fairly easy to set up and get running a lot of technical expertise.  However, being that my job here at Interview on Demand is to run the operations, build the software, and make sure that all systems are firing on all cylinders, I have to look under the covers a bit more than most people.

I’m sure that there are a lot of folks out there with WordPress installed and running their blog and I’ll bet that they didn’t know that a very simple ‘feature’ that gets installed by default is making their blog a much less effective medium that it could and should be.  Most everyone that has WordPress installed would love to have people make comments on their blog and to have people link to their blog from their articles.  This little known setting called ‘ rel=”nofollow” ‘ makes the links that people include in their comments and trackbacks actually not get indexed by search engines.  If you site doesn’t allow peoples comments to be indexed by search engines, then their motivation for commenting in the first place is going to be lessened.

There is a very simple fix for this — a plug-in for WordPress called DoFollow by Kimmo Suominen.  What it does is remove the default ‘nofollow’ condition so that people who post comments can now receive the benefit of having those links indexed to their sites.  It means that in your comments you can choose your anchor text, keywords, and hyperlinks that link back to your site.

We have installed DoFollow on our blog, because we want the people who take the time to make intelligent comments, to provide hyperlinks to informative articles and information to receive the benefit of sharing with others.  As they share with our audience, it helps make our site better an more valuable.  It will also encourage others to share and visit.  We anticipate building a readership that consists of jobseekers, third party recruiters, hiring managers, human resources professionals, as well as career coaches, resumes writers, and other vendors who work in some part of the hiring process.  All of those people should be able to contribute and connect better through blogging and commenting.  We just want to help do our part.

-author Carl Chapman is the founder and chief operating officer of Interview on Demand, LLC. Carl is also the founder of CEC Search - Executive Restaurant Recruiters. He has 20+ years of restaurant industry experience, spent 5 awarding winning years as an executive recruiter with a top 25 MRI franchise office. Carl graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1980.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

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