How to get fewer unsuitable job applications
If you’re like most hiring managers, you dread those times when your department throws-up a job vacancy that needs to be filled.
Suddenly you’re faced with having to do lots of things you’ve never been trained to do; things like posting a job advert, dealing with recruitment agencies, screening and interviewing candidates and making a job offer that will be accepted. Plus, there are all those unsuccessful applicants that need to be told they didn’t get an interview.
That last one is often the most onerous – which might at least partly explain why social media is awash with job seekers complaining how they’ve applied for jobs and not heard anything back from the hiring company or agency.
So, if you don’t want to be one of “those” companies and want to enhance your employer brand, first you need think about what your job postings look like.
Attract the right readers
The biggest single reason why a hiring company might get flooded with too many unsuitable applications is because not enough of the right people read the job posting.
And the biggest reason people didn’t read it is because it was too long and too boring, probably because much of it was lifted straight from the job description.
Internal job descriptions play an important part in hiring but, the only people who will willingly read an entire JD are people who have already decided it’s a job they might be interested in.
So, by that rationale, your job posting needs to be interesting to read.
It’s about them, not you
And the easiest way to get people to read a job posting is to make the opening 150 words all about them, not you.
If you can start to convince them why your job might be better than the one they’re in (or the others they’re applying for) then it’s likely they’ll read the whole thing – including the important part (near the end) that tells them what skills/experience/knowledge they’ll need to qualify.
If you do this, what you’ll have produced is a job advert, not just a one-dimensional job posting.
More importantly, when you make your job advert easier to read, not only will it reduce the amount of people who simply scanned the job title, location and salary before clicking ‘apply’, it will increase the number of qualified candidates who read it right till the end.
And the more of the right people who read the entire ad, the more are likely to apply or respond in some way.
The one big advantage job advertising has over all other forms of direct response advertising is that they often have to generate hundreds of customers to justify themselves.
A job advert only needs to find one customer.
If you’re looking for new ways to attract candidates to jobs, take a look at our Advertising Writing Courses
