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 »
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 »
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 »
I wrote recently about The Top 10 Problems TA Leaders Tell Me About. Job Descriptions was the #1 category. Note: Check out our free Job Descriptions Guide — it tells you everything we know about JDs, job ads and the like! This week I’m sharing the specific problems within job descriptions that TA leaders reach… Read more »
How good is your diversity statement? I asked my team to send me some of the best diversity statement samples they could find. They reviewed the Fortune 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity list and also Googled “Most Diverse Companies”. They gave me a list of 30 diversity statements they found. I whittled that down to 10 that… Read more »
I’m a white man — so what do I know about diversity? Perhaps not as much as you. But I’ve studied it. Closely. My super-niche Ongig business has one focus: job descriptions. And Ongig has built diversity tools to make your jobs gender-neutral, higher in positive sentiment and more readable. Our software helped 4X the… Read more »
My job is awesome. I chat with talent acquisition leaders most of the day, and then I work with the Ongig team to create software to (hopefully) solve those problems! About a year ago, I started a spreadsheet of the problems TA leaders shared with me. I decided to now share them with you —… Read more »
Thank you to the 15,000+ people who read my 10 Samples of an Effective EEO Statement. Let’s dig deeper into the readability of EEO statements! Did you see how an effective job ad should be written at the 8th grade or lower? Were you as surprised as me at the power of writing in Plain English for busy… Read more »
The goal of a job posting is simple. It’s to capture the right candidate’s attention with truthful content to help them decide whether to apply. Note: Check out our free Job Descriptions Guide — it tells you everything we know about writing job descriptions! What if I told you I could improve the effectiveness of your… Read more »
