3 Tips to Design a Creative Job Posting for Your Open Positions

When using digital platforms to hire for the open positions at your company, you’re often competing with tens of thousands of other job postings. And while some listings may boast a more recognizable company name, others may offer a more attractive pay. How, then, can you distinguish your job descriptions from all the noise on top job boards?

Well, the answer is creativity!

A strong dose of creativity coupled with careful messaging can make your job ads stand out. It’s not an easy task, but you can attract the right candidates with a bit of extra effort.

Keep reading to learn about a few creative ideas to help talent acquisition leaders create compelling job postings.

1. Leverage Personalization

With the national unemployment rate hovering at an all-time low,candidates now have the upper hand. Simultaneously, HR leaders seek “best-fit” candidates from the same talent pool, irrespective of industry. This has led to the job market becoming highly cut-throat.

If companies want to gain an advantage, they’ll need to have an interactive candidate experience. If companies don’t have a personalized candidate experience, they’ll risk losing top talent to competitors. This can ruin companies’ growth plans.

One research whitepaper found that job seekers satisfied with their candidate experiences have a nearly38% greater probability of accepting a job offer.

When you leverage personalization to enhance candidate experience in your job ad, you’re speaking to prospective candidates directly. This further piques their interest and compels them to apply for the role.

You should make sure that the language in your job description targets your audience. If you want to have a creative experience, make sure you keep your applicant coming back for more.

You may even want to include a perspective from your company’s CEO as well.  This not only makes the post feel more exclusive, as though your potential candidates are being let in on a big company secret, it also leaves them curious.

2. Keep Your Job Description Simple Yet Visually Appealing

Creating job posts that are simple and visually appealing should be your number one priority if you want to attract applicants.

One survey aimed at assessing the effect of visual job listings made the company that posted that more attractive found:

• Close to 51% of respondents would be more attracted to an organization that had job postings with visual elements (videos or images) than to an organization that didn’t, and
• Respondents were more attracted to the organizations with images in their job postings than those with videos (45% versus 31%).

These statistics further strengthen the assumption that job postings with visually appealing content have a significantly higher chance of attracting the best recruits for your company.

Jason Webster, Co-founder, and Head of Digital Recruiting at OnGig, in one of his recent interviews, said, “We have seen more time on the page and engagement with [visual] elements. Even if they don’t click ‘play’ on a video, if there’s a video on the page, visitors spend three times longer on the page than if there’s nothing there. If the video is clicked, that goes to around five times longer.”

Not only is a job post with a video going to make your opening stand out amongst a sea of competitors, but it will also give potential candidates a first look into your company culture. In essence, visual job descriptions like this will act as a catalyst when wanting to expand your team and scale quickly.

One best practice would be to use bright colors in your job title to attract more applicants as they are catchy and make your job ad stand out.

3. Don’t Forget to Showcase Your Company’s D&I Efforts

As talent acquisition leaders, we all know thatdiverse and inclusive workplaces drive innovative results.

According to findings of one recent survey conducted by Glassdoor, close to 57% of employeestoday think their company should be doing more to boost diversity. 

Yet businesses across the United States struggle to build a workplace culture that fosters diversity and inclusion (D&I), often failing to attract diverse talent due to inclusivity issues in the workplace.

Now more than ever, it is essential for HR managers to think about ways they can showcase their diverse company culture in their job postings (which, in most cases, happen to be the very first candidate touchpoints for any company).

While the job posting needs to have inclusive language, your commitment to diversity needs to be on your website and other career sites.

Making sure that your messaging around diversity, belonging, and inclusion carries through all your candidate-facing resources makes it feel more authentic. Also, by emphasizing why diversity matters specifically at your company, you can get people’s attention and show them this is something you approach thoughtfully, rather than simply relying on generic practices.

Apart from the three tips mentioned above, a few other things recruiters can do to make the job posting compelling to attract more applicants include:

• Try to be playfully appealing by including positive encounters and quotes from your employees on precisely what it is like working at your organization.
• Be unconventional in your approach to distinguish your ad from hundreds of others on the internet. One way of doing this is by including aptitude tests or market analysis tasks within the job posting itself.
• Create a narrative or story around your open positions by incorporating a sense of playfulness with humor. You can also keep the tone on the informal and friendly side if you decide to go this way.

To know more about what you can do to create job postings that reflect your organization’s essence when hiring suitable candidates and create compelling recruitment ads that can help you get there, contact us atRecruiter.com.

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