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 »
ERE Recruiting Conference Fall 2018 Recap: Most Valuable Tweets
One of two big HR conferences put on by ERE Media every year is the ERE Recruiting Conference. They have two sessions (Spring and Fall). Here are some topics they covered in the Fall session: TA leadership and strategy Improving the hiring process Diversity and Inclusion Recruitment marketing and advertising Candidate experience Candidate selection For… Read more »
5 Uses of Chatbots in Recruiting
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 »
Who’s Better at Recruiting: The Introvert or Extrovert?
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 »
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Candidate Needs (for Job Ads)
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 »
5 Things to Avoid in Your Job Titles
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. Below are some common mistakes to avoid in your job titles: Note: This article is part of our ongoing series on job titles called: Job Titles: The… Read more »
ERE Sourcecon 2018 (Fall) Recap: Most Valuable Tweets
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 »
How to Write Job Descriptions to Attract Millennials
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 »
8 Famous Jeff Bezos Quotes to Inspire Candidate Experience
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 »
Dell Inserts “Join Our Talent Community” Before Application on Job Descriptions
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 offers… Read more »
HR Tech Conference 2018 Recap: Most Valuable Tweets
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 »
How Long Should a Job Title Be?
I’m sometimes asked how long a job description title should be. Below are a few opinions from others I trust. Note: This article is part of our ongoing series called Job Titles: The Definitive Guide. 1 to 3 Words Job titles with 1 to 3 words had an apply rate twice as high as those with… Read more »
Boost Your “Digital” Candidate Experience with Job Page Overlays
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 »
How to use Candidate “Commitment Theory” to Boost Engagement & Apply Rates
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 »
Caution: Are You Using the “Kitchen Sink”-Style EEO Statement?
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 »
