Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
Job posts have an astonishing 90% failure rate because less than 10% of those who view a post actually apply. This failure rate is also extremely expensive. Because of its low success rate, some functions have to spend up to 60% of their recruiting budget on job postings alone. So, in my view, these results should alarm smart recruiting leaders!
Unfortunately, this painfully low “conversion rate” has made the job posting step one of the most damaging failure points in your entire recruiting process. Obviously, “you can’t hire top candidates that don’t apply.” Currently, 90% of them find nothing in your job posts that would make them apply. I estimate that this 10% conversion rate can be dramatically raised up to at least 25% after you institute a formal effort to convert your current “barely managed” job posting process into a compelling driver of applications.
Realize That Applying Advertising Principles Will Turnaround Your Results
Fortunately, the low “conversion rate” from job posts can be turned around if you realize their poor performance is primarily caused by weak content and hard-to-scan formats.
That simply doesn’t make most posts stand out or impress (in fact, most are boring), so if you are willing to adopt some best practices from advertising science (and its related advertising principles) and use them to guide the creation of your content, you can make your job posts powerful enough to drive more top candidates to notice your posts, read them, and immediately apply to them. You can immediately improve your overall hiring results.
Fortunately, turning your results around can be done quickly, without new technology and without spending any more of your recruiting budget.
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Your Content Must Be Guided By Proven Advertising Principles
The key to creating application-driving content is to utilize already proven “data-driven advertising principles.” That has been developed and used for decades in your customer advertising department. The most impactful of these content-building actions appears first on the list.
You must update your goals – The current approach of most job posts is simply to inform potential candidates about the duties and responsibilities of this job by providing prospects with a shortened version of the job description. However, if your job posts are actually going to become your prime driver of applications, your primary goal must shift beyond simply providing information. Instead, the strategic goal must be for your content to become a powerful potential candidate, a convincing and selling tool. That adds compelling information about the company, the work environment, and the job. So that most of your posts are guaranteed to get noticed, read, and trigger an immediate application from qualified individuals.
Ensure your job posts appear in a prospect’s job title and skills search – Having the most powerful content in your posts won’t matter much if your top prospects don’t ever see your posts. And because most prospects on job sites search for a job title and critical skills. Most prospects will only find your job if you purposely use the same (or similar) job title that they used in their job board search string. So, instead of automatically using “your actual job title” in your post, survey a sample of your applicants and your own employees in this job family to identify the job title (or titles) most used in their job search string. In addition, you should also include critical skills in your posts because most potential candidates also include a few critical skills in their search string. Performance testing is an important element of advertising science. You will, of course, need to have one of your recruiters test whether the most common job board search strings for this job. Consistently bring up your own open job.
Include content that will convince prospects to immediately read your entire post – In most cases, merely seeing a job post won’t be enough to convince your best prospects that they should immediately read it. So, you must include immediately visible bits of compelling information that will convince prospects to read your post immediately when they come across it.
These “I should read these features” that you should make immediately visible. Those compelling features might include exceptional pay, an amazing CEO, offering new hires equity, or the fact that your company and its products are award-winning. Immediately seeing compelling phrases will also drive many to read on. Those compelling phrases might include a unique opportunity, a rare opening, an amazing culture, share our excitement, a dream job, and exceptional growth opportunities. There are also some individual words that might convince the prospect to read further. Those words might include innovative, career-changing, a startup, or just using the word “compelling.” Once again, the key to success is to ensure that the prospect immediately sees two or three things that will cause them to want to read on.
Focus on including content that applicants care about (vs. what you want to tell them) – My research has found a primary content flaw in most job posts. These posts mostly include information that the company wants to talk about. Instead, it should focus on the factors that actually attract top applicants.
I called them “attraction factors” to increase the attraction power of a post. Most of what is provided in the post must “mirror” the precise factors that attract and cause top prospects to apply. You can identify these critical “attraction factors” by surveying a sample of your current top applicants. To identify the precise factors top prospects will use to select their next job.
It’s important to remember that the factors that attract the average worker will be markedly different from the factors that attract top prospects. For example, the average prospect might prioritize benefits, while the top prospects may care more about innovation, freedom, and new technology. So, choose the attraction factors that you include in your content based on data. Then, ensure these essential factors are easy to spot in your job post. Finally, avoid including any information that typically doesn’t match one of your top prospects’ attraction factors (i.e., often, these include routine job duties, minor qualifications, and paid time off). It is important also to note that by highlighting many attraction factors that your top prospects demand, you will automatically increase the percentage of the most qualified prospects that apply.
Prioritize your content and place the most impactful information early in the content – Most content creators fall into the trap of automatically following the format and the content that other rival job posters use. Don’t copy them because their content inclusion process will not have been data-driven. Instead, realize that most job posts will be quickly scanned. If you want your most important and compelling information to be immediately seen. You must purposely place your highest priority information early in the content of your job post. And when you can’t place it early in the post, highlight it using one or more “visibility tricks” (see the next section).
Use “visibility tricks” to highlight critical information throughout your post – Experts in corporate advertising realize that there are ways to make important bits of information “stand out” in a written narrative. I call them “visibility tricks” after applying any of these tricks. It’s essential that you test your posts to ensure that these tricks have actually made the targeted information stand out and easier to spot. Some of the most often-used visibility tricks include:
- Bold, italicize, capitalize, or underline the “must stand out information.”
- Use a larger or a different font in a few specific instances.
- Surround “the must-be-seen item” with white space.
- Make an important word within a sentence stand out by adding one extra space before and after the critical word (e.g., We are #1 in the rankings).
- Include a small arrow pointing to the information that must be seen.
- Place the three or four important bits of information in a bullet point format.
- Place the important information in a box.
Use the circle test to identify what was actually noticed and what factors increased their interest in applying – After you have drafted the content and format of your post. You must find out if all of your priority content will actually be noticed. You can identify what will be noticed using what I call “The Circle Test,” which is where you have a sample of your employees, applicants, or others working in this field. Quickly scan through your draft job post. During that scan, you have them note (or circle) each of the content items that “stood out” to them. If some of your important items “didn’t stand out,” you will need to revise your post to ensure that they are noticed in the future. You also need to know what content would actually influence a prospect to apply. So, after the circle test is completed, ask each tester to make a list of the “noticed factors” that would also have increased their interest in applying. Then, revise your content until all of your top five “influence them to apply factors” are routinely included in the tester’s lists.
Provide quick access to additional information, convincing them to apply – In some cases, the relatively low word limit of your post simply won’t provide enough space to allow you to thoroughly convince some of your top prospects to apply. So, make it easy for them to get that additional information instantly by providing them with either live links or a QR code. That will instantly connect them to this additional convincing material.
Identify and avoid common turn-off factors – In addition to the “attraction factors” that excite top prospects. You should also realize that there are some opposite “turn-off factors.” That can cause top prospects to lose interest instantly. So avoid including any of the turn-off factors that you have identified. Those factors might include appearing like you are talking down to the candidate, a low pay range, or the appearance of micro-management.
A few additional ways to stand out – some additional impactful ways to make your post more convincing. Include creating a mirror version of your job post in another language and a video job post where the manager and the team describe the job. Also, be aware that in some cases. Including a well-known logo or even a picture will allow your post to stand out visually. Incidentally, it’s usually a waste of space to include typical job duties (a few unique and compelling duties are okay). Because most applicants working in the field will already know the common duties of this job after just seeing its title.
Finally, test the superiority of your final job post – The final proof of the effectiveness of any new job post is that your post routinely wins direct side-by-side comparison tests. Begin by using an A/B test to determine which of your top two drafts is the most effective. Next, I recommend that you also include a competitor comparison. This is where you have testers compare the performance of your final job post alongside the very best job post (for the same job) that your talent competitor organizations are currently using. Obviously, you need to keep revising your post until it is rated as clearly superior to the best one used by your talent competitors. You can learn more details about how to conduct these two comparison tests here.
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Use Metrics To Continually Improve
The most important performance measure is the number of qualified applicants each post generates. Fortunately, many job boards can tell you which of your posts generated applications (because those applications were completed on their site). However, when you post in places that can’t connect an application to a post. It’s wise to add a job post identification number, a unique application website, or a code the prospect must cite in their application.
Some additional performance metrics you should track include the percentage of qualified applicants from each post and the percentage of applicants from each post that are actually hired. Incidentally, don’t over-worry about calculating your cost per hire. Job posts that actually result in a top new hire create so much measurable business impact and value. That their ROI is through the roof.
Final Thoughts
Let’s be brutally frank. Most current job posts are simply a carbon copy of the ones that appear alongside them. And because they are carbon copies, they can’t stand out or produce superior results. Another serious problem occurs when most current job posting processes don’t have anyone formally in charge of the entire process. Without accountability, the process won’t have a continuous improvement feature. So, when a new post is needed. Individual recruiters and hiring managers typically spend only a few minutes making minor adjustments to their last post.
And even if they wanted to continually improve. They couldn’t because no one currently has data that would prove which features worked and which ones didn’t. As a result, most open job posts never improve over time. It is this stagnation that adds to my view that now is the opportune time to rethink your entire extremely expensive job posting process. Look to consumer advertising for a handful of new data-driven approaches and techniques that will dramatically improve your overall recruiting results by actually turning your job post into “talent magnets.”
Note for the reader
This is the latest post from Dr. John Sullivan, who was labeled “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company Magazine. You can subscribe to his weekly Talent Management articles here or by following him on LinkedIn.
