How To Fix An Unsuccessful Job Posting
9 minute read
In 2019, searching for a job in content marketing (or any field, really) amounts to a lot of clicking. There are millions of job postings — likely even billions, given how positions are syndicated across different listing sites, job boards, and forums.
To candidates, the sheer volume is intimidating, especially given the relatively low rate at which they hear anything back.
To recruiters and hiring managers, this glut of posted jobs means that you may have a fantastic position to fill but no interest from qualified candidates.
But what can you do about it?
To answer that question, we reviewed all the research we could find about what makes some job postings successful while others fall flat.
It was surprisingly difficult to find actual data, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a dearth of advice. Thousands of articles have been written telling you all about how to write compelling job postings that appeal to the modern worker. The problem is, a lot of them are wrong.
Fixing job ads is all about simplifying.
Your candidates have to wade through oceans of listings, and most spend about 14 seconds deciding whether or not to apply — just enough time for a quick scan to determine whether the opportunity warrants a closer read.
That’s why it’s so important not to bury the details they’re looking for under meandering statements about your company culture. When LinkedIn asked job seekers which parts of the job description were most important, here’s what they said:
Compensation - 61%
Qualifications - 49%
Job Details - 49%
Performance Goals - 33%
Company Culture - 28%
Company Mission - 27%
Career Growth - 25%
Company Details - 23%
You’ll notice that the thing so many companies put first — the old “Who We Are” — comes in dead last. Your mission and your culture also rank in the bottom half of the list. Long before candidates decide if they want to invest their time and skills in your company, they need to know whether they’re qualified and if the compensation works for them.
For content roles, however, things may be slightly different. While we haven’t found any data for content roles specifically, it seems likely that in-house copywriters and content marketers would be more interested in who they would be writing for. If you’re hiring for an agency, including the sectors or verticals you work in the most.
Lastly, how you frame qualifications and details matters. If you’re optimizing not just for applications, but final candidate quality, focus more on goals and performance than skills and requirements. This is particularly important for content strategists, where candidates may have familiarity with best practices but no real experience tracking KPIs.
Create a clear structure that surfaces what candidates are really looking for.
Chances are, you’re already using a template that includes section headers and lists. The next step is examining how well those sections are guiding candidates to the right information.
If potential employees want to know about compensation, qualifications, roles and responsibilities, and relevant performance goals, how can you create a structure that leads them right to those details?
It helps to know a little bit about how people consume web content and job listings in particular. Heatmap information collected by LinkedIn suggests that job seekers are scanning for certain information and skipping other sections entirely.
Don’t fight it; instead, use formatting to draw the eye to the important things and convince readers to stick around longer than 14 seconds. Try changing up the wording of the headings and reordering bullet points in your lists to create an internal hierarchical structure. But don’t rely too heavily on bullet points; according to one study, a balance of about 1/3 lists and 2/3 paragraph copy is ideal.
Make it shorter.
To perform well, job postings need to be succinct and easy to digest.
According to LinkedIn, listings under 300 words do much better than ones that are 301-600 or 601+ words, averaging 8.4% more applications than average. If you simply can’t include all the necessary information in under 300 words, it’s okay to go longer— listings over 600 words garner applications at 1% above average. That said, more than 50% of LinkedIn’s job view are on mobile devices, so the shorter listings are naturally easier for smartphone and tablet users.
Our Seattle neighbors Textio found slightly different information. Their data showed that word counts between 300-750 words performed well, with 600-700 word listings performing the best overall.
The takeaway? For highly mobile platforms like LinkedIn, use an abbreviated version, but feel free to give slightly more detail on other platforms..
It’s not just the listing as a whole that needs to be trimmed down; shorter sentences will also bring in more candidates.
Textio’s data also suggests that applicants prefer short sentences that are easy to read, with the best-performing posts averaging just 13 words per sentence.
In summary, if you can spare your reader the clutter, they’ll appreciate it; if not, make sure every word is something they’ll want to know.
Importantly, when you’re working with writers, you will be judged on your overall writing quality. There’s no way around it. So use Grammarly, Hemingway, your colleagues, and even your high school literature teacher if need be.
Find a way to talk about compensation.
Listen, it’s the thing everyone wants to know. Companies try to avoid talking about money, often until after several interviews, but wouldn’t both you and the candidate want to know earlier if the numbers just didn’t work?
Companies are trying to get good people at a discount, and the narrative is often “if it’s a great fit and an exciting opportunity, they’ll take less and be happy about it.” Yet most employees consider leaving even what they consider to be good jobs because of money, so isn’t it time to acknowledge that there’s a disconnect somewhere?
Whether you include a salary range or some other type of reference, give it a try. Even a wide range will give potential applicants some transparency.
If you really, truly can’t, then try to include some numbers about retention, average tenure, or at the very least your benefits. A solid benefits package suggests a salary that will at least be competitive.
When it comes to culture, show, don’t tell.
As we saw above, potential employees aren’t very interested in the details of your company culture at this stage. That doesn’t mean that culture isn’t important; just that it’s something candidates consider once they’ve already vetted you for initial deal-breakers.
At this stage, all your company culture needs to be is a lubricant rather than a stumbling block. Don’t tell them about every single perk; instead, just make sure that the voice you use in your listing reflects your company’s identity and the day-to-day experiences of your employees.
When people are ready to learn more about your culture, they will seek it out — and they have strong preferences about how they want to explore it. Observing it for themselves during an office visit, discussing it with the hiring manager, and talking to other employees are the overwhelming favorites.
However, if you have a strong company culture and fitting into it is make-or-break, then you might choose to sacrifice some applicants to find the ones that really get it, and that’s fine too.
Tone and language matter. A lot.
When you’re writing a job posting, the goal is to strike a balance between relational and professional.
When job seekers were asked about their impression of the tone in a listing, 75% rated “generic” listings positively and 65% had positive impressions of a more formal tone, while only 39% had a positive impression of a casual tone.
This same pattern appeared when they were asked about their likelihood to apply, with formal and generic tones at 77% likelihood each and casual tones at 60% likelihood.
However, second-person language like “you” and “we” performs better than third-person language like “the successful applicant,” likely because it distances the job seeker from the opportunity. Even common language “candidates” is correlated with lower application rates.
Lastly, skip the buzzwords. What irritates people varies a lot by location (San Francisco loves “synergy” and Dallas hates it), but it all cases it’s safe to say that overused language turns people off.
Certainly, your industry standards and expectations matter, and if you feel you’ll attract the right candidates with more casual language or certain words and phrases, go for it. But as far as is possible, try to use language that appeals to everyone in your ideal candidate pool, or at least won’t actively turn off groups of people who are qualified for the job.
With content roles, the tone and language you use is also the candidate’s first introduction to your brand voice, so it’s all the more important that the job listing reflect your company identity.
Avoid gendered language.
Very often, the person writing a job listing unintentionally introduces gendered language that can skew their applicant pool and reduce their chances of finding the best candidate.
This isn’t just about alienating women; it impacts male candidates, too. It’s also important to understand the bias in your writing doesn’t necessarily align with your own gender, and it’s not usually the result of bias or sexism.
Many women tend to write using language that is coded more masculine, and vice versa. The issue isn’t with the person writing the listing, it’s with how the language used will impact the candidate pool.
If this doesn’t seem like a big issue to you, consider this: Amazon spent 3 years trying to develop an AI hiring tool and finally gave up because gender bias in the language of listings and resumes caused the system to consistently discriminate against female candidates.
You can run your writing through a free tool to uncover gender coding here.
Don’t skip the EOE Statement.
We aren’t going to spend a ton of time on this one, because it seems like a no-brainer, but there is data to back us up: adding an Equal Opportunity Employer statement is correlated with a 10% faster time-to-hire. The language here matters, though, and candidates want to feel that you mean it. The language should be warm and inclusive.
As with the gendered language issue, it isn’t just about candidates who are concerned about discrimination against them personally; people across all demographics prefer to work at inclusive companies. The payoff is lower turnover, higher job satisfaction, and better-functioning teams that are more productive.
Pay attention to the posting details and logistics.
It’s not just what you’re posting, but where, how, and when.
Whether you’re listing jobs directly on the major platforms or using a syndication tool, make sure you’re taking advantage of any opportunity to customize your post for the context in which it will be appearing.
Many job listing platforms let you add skills, keywords, tags, and other forms of metadata that can help you appear in search results for qualified candidates. Whenever possible, look at how similar jobs are presenting themselves on these platforms to optimize your own listings.
Along these lines, it can help to search for more specialized sites or platforms that can get you in front of certain types of applicants. For example, if there’s a certification you look for in qualified candidates, see if the governing body has a job board.
If you can, list and promote jobs early in the week, because 59% of all views and 57% of applications take place between Monday and Wednesday.
Lastly, don’t forget the title. It’s okay to add descriptors if they differentiate you in your industry (e.g. work from home days, remote applicants welcome, flexible schedule, etc.), though you don’t want your job to look spammy or cluttered.
BONUS: Optimize your follow-up emails.
Once you have your job posting drafted, you can get some extra bonus points with applicants by creating template emails that echo the tone and language of the post to follow up with candidates. It can be a short series like this:
Email 1: Acknowledge their application and set expectations about the process
Email 2: Update about the timeline
Email 3: Rejection and thanks
Email 4: Phone screen request
By creating a cohesive experience, setting expectations, and following through on them, you’re creating a brand experience that will set the stage for future interviews, negotiations, the onboarding process, and the candidate’s tenure with your company.
If they aren’t selected, they still had a positive experience that they’ll share with friends and colleagues — and chances are, one of those people will apply for a job one day.