Job postings are the first point of contact between your company and your future employees.
If you want to attract the right candidates, it’s essential to write an effective job posting that will resonate with them.
A compelling job posting can help your company stand out from the crowd, which will allow you to fill your vacancy faster.
The question is: what is a good job posting and how can you craft it?
In this article, we’ll give you tips and ideas on how to write great job postings.
Job postings are one of the most crucial elements of recruiting qualified candidates for vacancies in your company.
It’s a general guide, created to provide the necessary information for a job position and to introduce the company to potential employees.
Initially, job listings were published in newspapers. Now they’re posted on job boards, career sites, and staffing agencies. The further the reach, the bigger the potential for the right hire.
But why are job postings so important?
Many hiring teams use a template for their listings to keep them as similar as possible and maintain a consistent company brand.
Should you put effort into creating individual postings when you can use a simple template? What purpose does a posting serve?
Here are some of the functions that a good job posting seeks to fulfill:
First impressions are important and your job listing will have a huge impact on how the potential candidates view your company. Make sure you represent it well: this will help you attract the right kind of applicants.
Aside from the more general things, such as what type of business you’re running, you can showcase information such as how many years you have been in business, some of your interesting projects or clients, or the kind of equipment you work with.
It’s also important to talk about your company culture — attracting candidates which have a big culture add potential is great for business!
The next step is to let people know what they’re signing up for: aim for accuracy and a detail-oriented approach.
What are the duties and responsibilities of the role? Applicants should know what will be expected of them if they’re hired.
But remember that accuracy doesn’t mean exhaustion. List the essential functions of the position without going to great lengths to describe them.
This is the easiest way to filter out candidates who aren’t right for the position. And it will also help you to avoid bad hires, which in turn improves retention rates and reduces turnover.
Don’t be afraid to list as many qualifications as you deem necessary, but also remember it’s important to have realistic requirements for the position. According to HBR, this is proving to be a challenge for many recruiters.
Sometimes people apply for jobs they don’t want and aren’t qualified for, and that may happen because the job posting didn’t provide clear enough information about the vacancy.
A good job posting saves a lot of resources for both your company and the candidates, because it helps them get a better grasp of the position and whether they’d be an appropriate fit.
Don’t leave your applicants in the dark: describe step by step what happens from when people first apply to when they’re hired.
This can be particularly useful if the position you’re looking to fill only requires an interview before you pick the right candidate.
The people who are immediately available will apply to listings that describe a short hiring process; if your hiring process is longer, you can also target candidates who aren’t instantly available.
Another thing you should know about how to write effective job postings is that job postings are not the same as job descriptions.
Job descriptions are documents that list the main responsibilities of a job in detail: What the employee’s duties are, who they will report to, what qualifications and skills are necessary for the position, and other stuff like that. It’s best to write a job description in a concise and even what some might call a dry manner.
On the other hand, job postings are better described as advertisements for the vacancy.
You want to write a compelling title that will grab the attention of potential candidates. Summarizing the most interesting parts of the job is the priority, rather than listing all the employee’s duties.
Another thing that you’ll want to do in a good job posting is describe your company, the job position you’re hiring for, and other details like your business’s location, the gear that will be used for the job, and any perks your company offers. And you should do this in a way which would attract more applicants. Make it sound captivating!
If you aim to find a suitable employee for your company, you need to optimize the recruiting process, starting at one of the very first stages: the job posting.
If you put more time into planning an efficient job posting, you may find the right candidate for your vacancy faster.
But what is a good job posting?
Before we guide you through the process of how to write a good job posting ad, let’s figure out what information you need to collect.
To prepare yourself for writing a good job posting that will attract the right talent, you and the hiring team need to define:
This section should help the candidate get a clear overview of the job position and its responsibilities. It’s best to tailor it based on the level of the role.
If it’s a supervisory role, for example, explain more about the positions they’ll be overseeing and the expected outcomes of their management.
If it’s a posting for an hourly paid job, focus on critical tasks, the pace of the working environment, and the working hours. For example, does the position come with a flexible schedule? Or working on shifts? Specify this in the job posting.
What kind of person would fit the vacancy best? From which type of employee will your company profit the most?
If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you won’t be able to recognize it, especially if there are a large number of applications.
There are two types of skills you should define: hard skills and soft skills.
Another thing about the ideal candidate that you should keep in mind is that there are must-have skills and nice-to-have skills.
Don’t frighten away potential candidates by listing too many qualifications in your job posting. Define which skills are vital for the proper execution of the job and which would be a nice bonus.
Your company’s culture is its personality.
It’s important to introduce it to your candidates before you employ them. Almost three-quarters (73%) of professionals have left their job because of a poor cultural fit. This means there’s a huge risk of lowering your retention rate if you can’t hire candidates who match the company’s values and enjoy the environment.
You need to clearly define your company’s mission, ethics, values, working environment and configuration, and interactions between team members. You’ll also want to make sure the ideal candidate will have a strong culture add potential.
Do you have any employees who have a similar or even the same role as the one you’re looking to fill?
Think about those employees that you consider to be the most productive and successful:
These questions can guide you in the right direction when it comes to defining the ideal candidate for your job vacancy.
Consider the structure of the department you’re hiring for:
These are all things to think about before you start working on your job posting.
When you come to think about how your new employee will fit into your company, there are some things you’ll need to consider:
Connections at work are a vital part of most jobs.
Your company depends on the ability of your employees to work well in a team and keep up their productivity together. It’s good to look at the bigger picture, regardless of what job opening you’re looking to fill.
The onboarding process serves to transform systematically and purposefully the candidates into top employees. It’s not to be confused with orientation, which is just the first phase of onboarding.
Onboarding is a long process that may take up to twelve months. Keep in mind that a strong onboarding process improves new hire retention by 82% and increases productivity by 70%.
To map out your onboarding process, ask yourself the following:
To help with creating an efficient onboarding strategy, you can refer to our guide on how to improve your onboarding process with an onboarding checklist.
Defining a clear deadline for your hiring process will help you plan things out.
How much time do you have? Is the vacancy affecting the team’s productivity?
It’s always good to hire someone fast, but rushing into recruiting someone just because you’re pressured by deadlines can cost your company a lot: 30% of companies report that the reason they made a bad hire was because the hiring team was pressured to fill the vacant role quickly.
So make sure you know how much time you have and plan things out accordingly.
When you’re writing a job posting, you may feel tempted to focus solely on describing what will be required of your future employee, because you want to make sure the candidates know what they’re signing up for.
However, it’s important to remember your end of the deal, too: what benefits are you offering your employees? Is the compensation package competitive, and does it equal or exceed the industry standards for similar jobs?
Think about the perks and benefits you’re offering. What can attract potential applicants to your company? Is the location easily accessible? Can the employee work remotely?
Studies show that working from home increases productivity and was gaining popularity even before the pandemic. Remote hiring and remote work are becoming a big part of the working process of every company. Even though they present a few challenges, there are ways to increase the benefits of remote hiring.
Job seekers invariably care about their future, so you need to address these questions in the job posting:
Now that you’ve clearly defined the necessary information, you can start writing the job posting itself.
We’re going to guide you through it step by step, but before that, a few general tips:
With this advice in mind, you can start writing an effective job posting.
You can use this tool to help you with the classification title. If it’s not descriptive of the duties of the job position or it sounds too unclear, come up with a more catchy posting title that will attract talent.
Describe your values, your mission, and your history to help applicants to know you and relate to you.
This includes duties, responsibilities, team, hierarchical structure, etc. Be specific without going into unnecessary detail.
What are the minimum requirements? What skills and experience should they have? Be clear and realistic — defining realistic requirements for job vacancies can prove to be a challenge.
Let the applicants know what to expect.
Are you going to conduct structured interviews? Will you be using any skill tests?
Pre-employment testing can be a powerful tool for assessing the strengths of your candidates.
Provide information about the next steps the candidates should take and use active verbs and concise structure, for example, “follow the link to apply”. That encourages people to engage with your job posting.
Advertise the benefits your company offers. That’s a huge motivating factor for applicants. Focus on describing the most attractive perks of the job.
Excellence requires care and patience. Read your job posting again and have other people read it, too. They may provide much-needed feedback that will help you when you edit the posting.
Writing a good job posting isn’t enough to guarantee a fast and efficient hiring process. But it’s definitely a big step in that direction, and it can help you attract the attention of top talent.
Following a few simple guidelines can help you craft a creative and compelling job posting and attract the right candidates for the job vacancies at your company.
With TestGorilla, you’ll find the recruitment process to be simpler, faster, and much more effective. Get started for free today and start making better hiring decisions, faster and bias-free.
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