You may have found it trickier to fill your business’s open vacancies lately, which shouldn’t be a great surprise. After all, it’s widely agreed that the job market presently favours candidates, which may mean firms like yours have to work harder to attract the attention of jobseekers.
Your job advertisements, though, will play a big role in determining whether a given talented candidate takes much notice of your opportunity at all.
So, here are some of the steps we recommend you take to craft a genuinely head-turning advert for your current open position.
Provide all of the essential day-to-day details
At the very least, a potential candidate should be able to come away from your job listing with a fairly good idea of what life at your company in this role is probably like.
Does the job involve working at a desk, for instance, or in the field? Will the employee work largely by themselves, or while interacting closely with a team? What daily activities will be expected of them that aren’t necessarily ‘typical’ for this particular job title?
Give a sense of the ‘big picture’
Talented people like to feel that they make a genuine difference in their job. So, does your job advert make clear how this would be the case if they chose to work for you?
The more you reveal in your job description about just how influential the worker in this position will be in the context of your company’s broader operations, structure and culture, the more likely it is that the most genuinely suitable candidates will take an interest.
What teams will the new hire work with, for example? How is their role likely to evolve over time? What is the link between the job and your company’s mission statement and values? In short, how truly significant is this vacancy to the wider health and success of the organisation?
Outline the past experience needed
Yes, a certain combination of skills and personality will be required for your vacancy. However, it’s also vital to set out experience requirements that won’t unnecessarily exclude potentially suitable candidates, nor attract such a wide range of applicants that you have to spend a lot of time whittling them down.
A good ‘baseline’ here is to include the level of experience needed – even if you’re no more specific than simply stating ‘entry-level’ or ‘mid-level’ – along with any associated hard skills, such as proficiency in a certain language or technology.
A well-crafted job advertisement that gives the viewer a good impression of what you genuinely need will lead to many of them self-selecting themselves in or out of the running – which means you are more likely to receive expressions of interest from only the most suitable candidates.
Remember that once you have put together the perfect job description, the most comprehensive applicant tracking systems – such as Webrecruit ATS – can help you to distribute it into the wider world both swiftly and easily.
Webrecruit ATS is just one of the many recruitment services that we are pleased to offer to ambitious organisations looking to optimise their hiring approaches for 2019. To learn more about them, simply peruse the website of our leading fixed-fee recruitment agency today.
