Creating Effective Job Postings

Finding the perfect hire in today’s job market can feel like a wild goose chase. No wonder recruiters rely on job postings to broaden their reach and hook highly qualified candidates. However, there’s much more to job postings than stringing a few sentences together and posting them on job boards. For job postings to draw interest, they must stand out from the crowd and speak to the right people.

Creating effective job postings is a fine art; it goes way beyond listing job requirements. These days, job postings need to sparkle. Here’s everything you need to know to get your job postings noticed.

Excite Your Potential Candidates

A job posting is often a person’s first interaction with the company, so it should excite the candidate about the organization and the advertised role. Your potential candidates will want to evaluate whether they have the right skills for the role and if they could be a great fit. To do this effectively, you must showcase company culture, values, and USPs (unique selling points). Remember, many potential candidates will already be in a similar role, so why should they jump ship and join you?

Share Your Company Mission

Sharing the company’s cultural values is the most crucial part of the job listing. By describing the company or organization’s mission, history, workplace dynamic, and future goals, the candidate can better assess whether they would be an excellent long-term cultural fit for your business.

Optimize for SEO Keywords

It’s essential to make your job postings easy to find. Ensure all job postings are search-friendly. When potential hires are foraging through hundreds of job postings, they will most likely be using the same key terms, so be sure to utilize those and combine them with words that will make your posting stand out. Use words and phrases specific to your organization and the position, and where appropriate, include anything special that will attract niche candidates.

Use Concise Job Titles

Your job title should concisely and accurately reflect the role. Avoid jargon. Use industry-relevant terms and, for clarity, indicate the position level (i.e. Junior, Senior, Manager). Simple and short works best.

Create Engaging Job Descriptions

Job descriptions need to be informative but also engaging. When describing the position, a long, wordy paragraph with granular-level detail isn’t the most inspiring. Typically, job descriptions are divided into two sections: an overview of the job and a list of assumed responsibilities. Follow this format to keep the posting organized and prevent the description from overwhelming the reader, which could put candidates off.

Avoid cliches. Rockstars and ninjas are old school. Knowledgeable professionals looking for their next role can do without the extra hype.

Wording matters. In an article on crafting highly effective job descriptions, a quote from Claire Rutkowski, senior vice president and CIO Champion at Bentley Systems, says that words can drive people away. “For engineering firms to be more inclusive, they need to use the words ‘preferred qualifications’ instead of ‘requirements’. When you say something is ‘required’, many people will take that literally.”

Use Effective Formatting

How you format and organize the content in your job posting is important. To ensure the information is easy to absorb, limit descriptions to only the essentials. Try formatting listable items using bullet points and organize these into clear sections. This will make your job posting more precise and more user-friendly and make it look professional, enticing candidates to apply.

The overview: This is the space to outline the role. Stay out of granular detail here. A short paragraph should summarize what the job entails. Try to highlight the company’s mission and one or two exciting aspects of the role. A quick tip: use the first person rather than the third. Addressing candidates directly (‘you’) will help with engagement and make the job listing seem more personable. Keep these sentences short, and don’t overuse descriptive words.

Role responsibilities: This is where you can give more specific details about the role. In this section, it is best to avoid the paragraph format. Using a list is much better. Concise bullet points for responsibilities make them easy to scan and read, meaning potential candidates can quickly see if they are a good fit. Also, it is best to pick about five or six of the major responsibilities and go into detail about those rather than making a long and unwieldy list of everything.

Essential and Preferred Skills and Achievements

This section of your job posting will list the essential and preferred skills needed for the role and the experience required for the position. It is advisable to follow bulleted formatting for this section. Again, this is so that potential candidates can quickly scan the information and decide whether they fit the criteria for the position.

Emphasize Career Growth Opportunities

Candidates are more likely to apply if they see a clear career development path. Mention training programs, mentorship opportunities, or advanced career tracks within the company. This illustrates your commitment to your employees and their personal growth.

End with a Clear CTA

The whole point of your job postings is to prompt candidates to apply. Always end any job posting with a clear call to action, including details on how candidates should submit their applications and any additional documentation they must provide. It’s also good to mention your hiring timeframes so people applying know what to expect. Don’t forget that clear timelines and visibility into progress are included in the top five things people expect from the hiring process.

Don’t Turn Your Back on AI

There are lots of AI tools available today to help with content creation, which is super exciting for recruiters. Utilized correctly, AI can save a lot of time. At Tracker, we recognize the importance of moving with the times, so Generative AI is now featured in our software to help recruiters generate job descriptions and candidate summaries, create email templates, and efficiently rank candidates from directly within the Tracker system.

In general, though, let’s be clear: AI is still far from being your full-time Personal Assistant. Content creation tools, like ChatGPT, can save a lot of time, but you’ll still need a sharp eye to check the content. Adding your organization’s special sauce and a few extra sparkles is well worth the effort.

Streamline your Job Postings with Tracker

Job board posting is one of the most critical aspects of the recruitment lifecycle. With Tracker, you can ensure your jobs attract the best talent from thousands of job boards worldwide.

Using Tracker, recruiters can automate the parsing of job specs and create a post-ready version to post to the company website using a simple integrated job publishing function or push out to any of your subscribed job boards from a single page.

We have fully integrated partnerships with leading job boards such as Indeed and Monster, multi-posters such as Broadbean and LogicMelon, and social media channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, so your core posting service is included in our Job Board plan, meaning no 3rd party contracts are required.

In addition, our supplemental Jobs+ service includes built-in technology that makes it quick and easy to distribute jobs. Postings are automatically search-optimized, giving you the best opportunity to rank high on Google and other search engines.

Give your job postings the edge with Tracker. Get in touch, or book a demo now.