There are a handful of words and phrases that can crush your job descriptions. Use just one of these phrases and you could lose 50%+ of your candidates. These words are considered “exclusionary” by some and just plain offensive by others. A couple of examples (I grayed out the names of the employers cuz we don’t… Read more »
The head of talent acquisition at a cloud software enterprise asked me the other day: “Who’s better at recruiting: the introvert or the extrovert?” Traditionally, most people have considered extroverts to be the best salespeople. And since recruiting is often just sales by a different name (especially in a candidate’s market), conventional wisdom is that extroverts… Read more »
I’m reading a great new book about winning political fights — it’s called The Fixer by Bradley Tusk. It reminded me of a powerful marketing tool (“self-interest”) to win over candidates through job ads. What’s a job candidate’s top self-interest? You could do worse than to use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I’ve transposed the normal Maslow… Read more »
A job title is the first part of a job ad that a candidate sees. Its purpose is critical: to get the candidate to click through to read the entire job ad. Here are some common mistakes to avoid in your job titles: 1) Too Many Words or Characters If your job title is too long, you’ll get… Read more »
One of the more engaging, recruiter-based, HR conferences of the year is ERE’s Sourcecon. They go into depth on everything recruiting including a Hackathon. Topics covered the past couple of days included: Technical sourcing Post-apply candidate experience and tools Recruiting hacks Candidate marketing Recruiting neurodiversity Employer branding Data mining If you missed Sourcecon here are… Read more »
Recruiting millennials is critical. Millennials (born 1982-2003) will make up 1 of 3 adults in America by 2020 and 75 percent of the workforce by 2025, according to the Brookings Report (see “How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street And Corporate America”). Veronica Wright, a CEO at ResumesCentre talked about hiring millennials recently: “The energy and… Read more »
One of Amazon’s greatest advantages is their ability to innovate the customer experience. And we in recruiting all know the “candidate” IS the “customer”. We decided to have some fun and take 8 Jeff Bezos quotes and replace “customer” with “candidate”. Read these over and really zoom out. Are you obsessively focused on candidates and creating… Read more »
Some of you may worry that you’ll lose a candidate during your lengthy ATS apply process. Dell has a nice workaround to make sure it doesn’t completely lose the candidate. Here’s the candidate experience flow: 1. The first step is that the candidate clicks apply on Dell’s nice dynamic job description: 2. Dell then… Read more »
The Human Resource Executive HR Technology Conference is consistently one of the biggest HR conferences of the year. Since there were so many insightful tweets we made a table of contents to make it more organized. Enjoy! Table of Contents Employee Experience & Engagement Candidate Experience Recruitment Marketing & Content HR Technology Women in HRTech… Read more »
I’m sometimes asked how long a job description title should be. Here are a few opinions from others I trust: 1 to 3 Words Job titles with 1 to 3 words had an apply rate twice as high as those with 12+ words source: “Shorter job ad titles led to higher apply rates” section of Appcast’s… Read more »
If you’re like just about every other talent acquisition/diversity leader I know, recruiting women is one of your top diversity goals. 1) Limit your must-have requirements One HP study showed that men apply for a job if they meet 60% of the qualifications, but women only apply if they meet 100% of them. That’s huge!… Read more »
What is a Job Page Overlay? A job page overlay (or job wrapper) is a design layer you put over your applicant tracking system to generate new job pages. This makes your pages more engaging and attractive to candidates. You get a higher time on page and apply rate. Why Use a Job Page Overlay… Read more »
You’ve heard me talk about “readability” in job descriptions recently. It’s vital. I now think of readability as one of the 3 main levers for writing a more effective job description (the other 2 are gender-neutrality and positive sentiment). The more readable your job descriptions, the higher the apply rates (we’ve measured this with machine learning)…. Read more »
Entrepreneur Magazine once wrote about how the job descriptions my Ongig software created for our clients caused candidates to spend up to 5 minutes and 23 seconds viewing the ad (more than 6X the time spent on typical job ads at the time). At the heart of this high candidate engagement is what I call… Read more »
Are you using an EEO statement like below? There are a few reasons that the above EEO statement is less effective at attracting candidates/diversity. It’s: Too long. At 64 words, it’s a tough read Not punchy (21 words per sentence) (8 to 13 would be better) More likely to offend (it’s tough to keep track… Read more »
