Nothing says: “We’re a 21st century company” faster than being able to send job candidates to your team blog.

It’s not nearly as daunting as you may fear, and I’ll walk you through the major steps in a 2-part article this week. The best part is, your team can probably do most of the work (which is actually the point—this is primarily their blog on what it’s like to work in your office).

The reason for suggesting a blog is that you don’t have to set up any infrastructure or create any web pages. It’s fast and simple. The real value of this is it creates an archive of credibility for your workplace brand, because it’s not just some static company web page that blathers on about what a nice place it is to work. Instead, here’s your actual team, saying in their own words, what they like about working for you. It’s exactly the kind of information that applicants under the age of 40 would find appealing.

Goals of blog: Team member recruitment is the primary goal, but you may come up with additional uses—just be clear at the outset. Attracting new clients probably does NOT mix well with this objective.

Plan the content: What aspects of your workplace brand do you want to illustrate? To be sure the blog meets your goals, get clear about the messages you want to convey. For example: • How gorgeous your office is? • How much fun you have working there? • How well-organized your space is? How friendly your team is? While the actual blog should read as a mostly spontaneous, casual creation, it should actually be carefully thought out ahead of time to be sure all your objectives are met.

Domain name: Register a unique name for your Internet blog address that says something positive about your agency and will be intriguing to job candidates. For example, my team is using: www.workinghereisfun.com . You might use a variation of bestplacetoworkportland.com, greatplacetoworkdallas.com, bestteaminboston.com and so on. As you’ll see in a moment, the idea is to be a bit mysterious with the name. If you are in a competitive market, by all means, include the name of your city in your domain name.

Hosting: This is free at many Internet locations (Blogger, WordPress.org), or in some cases, there is a very minimal monthly fee (TypePad). You may already have your own website with a free blog as part of it that you just need to activate. There are endless blogging resources online, just Google ‘em.

Customize it: You will want to do a few minimal things, such as selecting a color scheme, adding your bio and photo, putting the name of your agency in the header—this can be done in under an hour by most people with an average ability at using the Internet.

Start blogging: There should be a welcome message pinned permanently to the top of the blog. It would probably be from you, though it could be from your whole team. The point of it is to explain to first-time visitors what the purpose of the blog is. From then on, blog entries (posts) are made as often as you like and are automatically archived chronologically as well as into categories that you determine.

Key tip: Whenever you do have an active job opening, have an alternate welcome post pinned to the top of the blog that tells about the opening.

Assign a head blogger: Pick someone to be in charge of getting it up and running and making sure enough content is put on it to make it useful. He or she should also see that new posts are added at least monthly and especially whenever something significant happens. (A new team member is added, a career milestone is celebrated, professional awards, team outings, etc.)

That’s enough info to get you started—I don’t want to overwhelm you. We’ll finish it up in my next article. Remember, as newspapers fade as the go-to source for job openings, more and more candidates are doing their job hunting online. Make it easy and inviting for them to learn about your company and why they’d want to work there, and you’ll have a big advantage over your competition.

If you’re serious about improving your recruitment processes, check out my Employee Attraction System™ here; it’s full of great ideas like this.

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