The Ultimate Guide To Job Posting
Hiring is hard. Here is our guide to creating the ultimate job post.
Often times a job post can be an overlooked component or piece of the hiring process, however it's one of the most important. It sets the standard of expectation and it's often times the first impression job seekers get of your company, its culture, and its mission.
Ensuring you have a well written, succinct, and insightful job post is key to attracting talent. We've put together this guide to help you attract the right applicants and help you improve your hiring metrics like Time to Hire, Fill Rate, etc.
If we breakdown a job post to its simplest form, it would be best described as an ad. It's literally an ad for a job or career at your company and you can have great ads and really awful ads. You can have genuine ads or disingenuous ads. The better the job post, the better the ad, the better the applicant pool.
We've all experienced it, you likely read the job post, read the job description, applied, interviewed, got the job, and six months in you found yourself wondering why the job description didn't include half the work you were doing.
This is to say, you should be realistic when writing your job posts. Choose the right title for the job, do your best to limit the use of buzzwords, and make sure your job posts are aligned with the actual responsibilities and deliverables the job requires.
Some say titles aren't important, others say they are. Titles are important for several reasons, including SEO, job standardization and more.
Be sure to check for job titles that are closely aligned to the role. The last thing anyone wants is to apply for a Sales Manager job and be hired to do a Sales Representative's job.
Being succinct is key to a well written job description. We've broken it down to a few tips:
suc·cinct adjective (especially of something written or spoken) briefly and clearly expressed.
- 1.Speak directly with someone currently in the role, has done the job, or is at an equivalent level in the organization.
- 2.Describe the role in Layman's terms. In other words, avoid buzzwords.
- 3.Discuss the role with the hiring manager or direct supervisor to understand what's expected of the role, how success in the role is measured, and what the day-to-day is like.
- 4.List at least five key results you expect the role to deliver and use this to recruit applicant's that have delivered such results.
- 5.Write the job description from an applicant's perspective. Be succinct and friendly.
- 6.Use this opportunity to let your company culture live thru the job description.
- 7.Be sure to spell-check and use proper grammar throughout.
- 8.Make use of bullet points, bite size pieces of information are helpful for applicants.
It's critical for both recruiters and hiring managers to be aligned on what's expected of the role, the applicants, and the job search. Otherwise expect wasted time and money, potentially bad hiring decisions and a detrimental impact to the business.
The best way to think through this is by making two buckets of 'wants' and 'needs', what exactly is needed in this role, what are the soft and hard skills required.
If you look around everyone uses the standard boilerplate job requirements like education level, but you should really consider only what's truly required in order to be successful in the job and deliver the results you're expecting.
Let's be honest, you're not just competing as a business in general, but you're also competing for talent. It's important to realize this early on, because it changes your thought process and approach to the hiring process. It also means that you should think of providing the ultimate job experience, ultimately your hiring process becomes one of your products.
With Clarify you get to source and hire based on results. That being said, if your organization uses SMART goals or OKRs you should probably use this time align those with the job you're hiring for. You can use these in Clarify to give applicants an idea of what you're looking for, they in turn use their achievements to apply while highlighting what they've done and can do, giving you better insights.
If you haven't caught on by now, we'll say it again... job posts are essentially ads. You're competing for not only talent, but for distribution and exposure of your ad, and there's a ton of noise.
You can read more about marketing, hiring, and applicants but for now it's best to know that you should probably make a budget to distribute your job across many paid platforms or to rise your job post above the rest in special features or premium spaces.
Remember, just because you build it, it doesn't mean they will come. So make sure to allocate resources to marketing the job.
You should be aware that generally there's alot of noise and volume, and the job market has automatically optimized for this with mass scale job post distribution for the masses and easy apply. The thought here is that the easier the application process and the wider you cast your nest, the more quality applicants you'll attract. This is actually the least optimal approach.
We recommend fishing where the fish are, meaning distributing your job posts in niche communities and job boards to attract the specific type of talent you're looking for. You'll optimize for talent, time, and money.
Here are a few of our favorite job boards to better optimize for job fit:
| Description | Type | Website |
WeWorkRemotely | We Work Remotely is the largest remote work community in the world. With over 2.5M monthly visitors | Paid | |
Diversify Tech | Job Board for underrepresented folks in tech | Paid | |
goodgigs | goodgigs is a platform for purpose-driven professionals to get access to careers, courses, and community. | Paid | |
Protege | Remote opportunities for junior developers. | Paid | |
Trade Hounds | Trade Hounds enables top contractors to hire the right tradespeople, for less. | Paid |
So now we're here and you're wondering okay, what does this all look like. Well lucky for you, we've put together an example of a job post for Clarify:
Last modified 2yr ago