I love job ads. I just found a study on them that I feel silly for missing. Sorry! It shows that speaking to a candidate’s needs in a job ad gets you 13.6% more applicants than focusing on the skills your job requires. In other words, focusing on THEM beats focusing on YOU. Not only… Read more »
Note: Here is the updated post for best job descriptions of 2019. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————— Here’s a shout-out to 10 of the best job descriptions for 2018. They grab the candidate’s attention and engage them. Note: Check out our free Job Descriptions Guide — it tells you everything we know about JDs, job ads and the like! And… Read more »
I’ve written a lot about job descriptions. But I figure you might want one single place to quickly find something you need on anything related to JDs, job ads, job postings et al. So please enjoy this new Free Job Descriptions Guide. When I say it’s “free”, I mean it. It’s not gated. You don’t… Read more »
The job hopper. It’s a sore subject but well worth talking about. Especially about how to avoid them. After all, job hoppers can make or break a team or company. What is a Job Hopper? Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri should know. He and his co-founder David Duffield are so into hiring that they interviewed the… Read more »
Here are some company career page ideas that stood out to me recently. Enjoy! 1. Career Site-Wide Chatbot A timely (if not immediate) response is key to keeping candidates engaged on your company career site. If a candidate is asking questions that means they’re interested. You don’t have to send them to a contact us… Read more »
Did you know that 608,000+ people per month do a Google search on this type of phrase: “[name of employer] benefits”? (Assurant, Walmart, Costco are the top 3 by the way). Candidates want to know the list of perks and benefits that big (and small) companies are offering. Did you also know that each benefit… Read more »
The most important question a candidate has is: “Why should I work for you?” The operative word is “why”. That’s why it’s surprising that the 4 most common sections of a job description focus almost entirely on answering the question “What?” Examples: Overview/Summary of Job — Most JDs use this to say “what” the position… Read more »
Chatbots is a new tech concept getting a lot of attention in recruiting and beyond. I don’t think that chatbots is the Holy Grail for any one thing in recruiting. I believe that Chatbots will instead become a ubiquitous interface for different parts of the recruiting process. I’ve looked at a few uses of chatbots and… Read more »
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. Exclusionary words in job descriptions are so rampant, that Ongig’s Text Analyzer now flags them… 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 »
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 »
