Even for the most seasoned HR pros, it can feel almost impossible to know what job seekers are actually looking for in a job posting. You may spend hours carefully laboring over the perfect posting, going into excruciating detail on all of the different benefits and great things someone can expect when working at your company. You go out and post it on as many job sites as possible—even ones you have maybe never even heard of. You do all of this just to be stuck filtering through a plethora of applications from people who probably didn’t even take the time to read your carefully crafted job description.
If this sounds like you, don’t worry: you’re not alone. At Payday HCM, we’ve seen numerous current and potential clients battling with this exact issue. Sure, it’s one thing to create an amazing benefits package, offer a competitive salary, and wrap all of it up neatly with a swanky title, but if no one even clicks on the posting, then what’s the point of all that?
In this article, we’ll go over three tips for creating an engaging job posting. We’ll go through the ins and outs of job postings: what job seekers are looking for, what they are not looking for, and simple mistakes that, while at first glance may not seem like a big deal, but upon further inspection may be costing you top talent. By the end of this article, you’ll have everything you need to know to create an eye-catching job posting—you maybe even be able to start thinking about interview questions (but lets not get ahead of ourselves).
The tips covered in this article include:
- Understand The Job You’re Hiring For
- Ensure Your Job Description Is Short And Compelling
- Make Your Job Description Clear And Inclusive
Understand The Job You’re Hiring For
Before you begin creating the job posting, you’ll want to make sure you’ve hammered out the details. It’s important to understand the ins and outs of the position you’re trying to fill in order to create an engaging posting.
Understand The Job Duties
Before you begin working on your job posting, you want to ensure you understand the job that you’re hiring for. This may sound obvious, but it’s an important first step to take so that you can ensure your job posting is as accurate and attractive as possible.
The best way to do this is by speaking with employees who are working or have worked in similar positions or departments. You want to get a sense of their actual day-to-day tasks. This can be especially important in situations where you’re hiring for a position that your organization hasn’t hired for in a while. What’s changed, and how do you make sure that change is reflected in the job posting?
Research, But Don’t Copy And Paste
Job postings don’t exist in a vacuum—in fact, your job posting is likely only one of hundreds or maybe even thousands for the exact same job. Before you sit down to write the job description, don’t be afraid to take a look at what these other job postings look like. If you were applying to this job, what things would stand out to you about these other postings?
What you don’t want to do, though, is simply copy and paste either sentences or even whole descriptions from other postings. If you can sniff out a copy and pasted cover letter (or maybe even an AI-generated cover letter), it’s likely applicants can spot a similarly copied job description.
Ensure Your Job Description Is Short And Compelling
A good job description is engaging and gets to the point. You’ll want to make sure yours does the same thing.
Explain The Job In As Few Words As Possible
Let’s be honest: when was the last time you really read something you saw online in full? Well, hopefully, you said, “right now,” because you’re reading this article, but before that, it had probably been a while. And if you’re spending hours upon hours, day after day, scrolling through job postings, you’re also probably not reading many of them too closely.
So, then, there’s no need to write the next Great American Novel with your job posting: just say what the job duties are, who you’re looking for, and a little bit about the company and its culture. Any other information (besides perhaps what you’re legally or technically required to include) likely isn’t necessary.
Make The Job Posting Unique To Your Company
As mentioned above, someone looking at your job posting is likely looking at hundreds of other postings for similar or nearly identical jobs. This creates the unique problem of both needing to come off similarly to these other job postings to attract candidates looking for those specific jobs, but also different enough to make your organization’s opening worth applying to.
Creating a “unique,” job posting is certainly easier said than done. The best thing you can do for your company is just to be honest and not overthink it. Don’t approach it with the mindset of writing everything your company does differently: just write what your company does and what the culture is like. That way, you’ll attract candidates that are truly a good fit for your business.
Make Your Job Description Clear And Inclusive
Making the job description clear and concise as well as inclusive of all possible candidates can help elevate your job posting and attract top talent.
Ensure Your Job Description Is Easy To Understand
Much like prioritizing shortness and uniqueness, you also want to make sure that your job description is as clear as possible to the person reading it. Sometimes, people can get lost in esoteric job titles or descriptions. Be sure your posting isn’t that.
Really, ensuring your job description is clear includes incorporating the elements mentioned above focusing on shortness and honesty. So long as you’re hitting those metrics, you’ll most likely be crafting a clear and easy to understand description in the process.
Avoid Limiting Language
A job description is generally not designed to turn people away. Sure, you don’t want “unqualified” people to apply for your job, but you want to be really careful about what you’re putting forth as “unqualified.”
According to Top Echelon, gender-biased language can seriously harm your ability to attract talent as both men and women might be less likely to apply to certain jobs if the language appears too feminine or masculine, respectively.
According to the Harvard Business Review, a good step in avoiding limiting language is to just imagine what the job description you have might sound like to a certain group. Even better, if there are employees comfortable with performing sensitivity reads, ask them to do so. You don’t want to miss out on a top candidate because the job posting makes them feel like they might not belong at your company.
Better Postings, Better Candidates
Hiring is no easy feat. As it remains hard to tell whether our cooling job market is going away any time soon, both job seekers and organizations with job openings are struggling to find the right job or candidate for them. This is only emphasized by the twenty-first century’s new way of hiring, where a seemingly endless stream of postings and applications come in, and it’s hard to tell if they’re legit or not. Hiring has always been tricky business, but now more than ever, it feels just that much more difficult. With the tips provided in this article, though, you’ll be able to take that first step in finding the right candidate you’ve been waiting for.
Your job posting might just be one piece in a larger puzzle, though (remember that labor market we just mentioned?). Check out our article on how a cooling labor market impacts all facets of your business, including hiring.
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