3 Common Recruiting Problems Caused By Your Job Posting
Simply Hired Staff
As we dig deeper into the craft of writing highly effective job posts, it becomes important to align your job posting efforts with core company goals. Whether your company is swamped with so many resumes for every open position that no one can possibly review them all or you spend your days looking at a near empty candidate pool, you can refine your job postings to solve your problem.
If you aren’t sure how your job posting goals compare to your recruiting goals, consider the following three common hiring scenarios that you can fix with the perfect job posting.
You aren’t getting enough candidates
If you receive one perfect candidate for each job post you submit, then you’re the model of efficiency and should be applauded. However, this is rarely the case. According to our research, not getting enough candidate response for a job posting is the most common problem companies face when they begin recruiting.
If your current job posting isn’t performing, first start with keyword and SEO adjustments to get more eyes on the page. If possible, compare how often your posting showed up in search results to how often it was viewed. Speak the language of the job seeker to make sure potential employees understand whether or not this position would be a good fit for them. Review the job posting to make sure you have explained how candidates will contribute to the company, and describe your company in a way that makes it sound like it is worth contributing to.
You’re getting too many candidates
If you aren’t getting enough response from your job posting, this particular problem might sound like a blessing. But imagine if you posted a job listing and immediately received hundreds of responses. You would need several hours to sort through the resumes and cover letters and make a long list of potential interviews, all without the guarantee that the perfect candidate is waiting at the end of the interview round.
If you’re getting too many candidates from your job posting, it’s worth editing your posting to be more specific about the job itself, the company, the industry and the requirements. Start by adjusting the requirements to eliminate the largest number of candidates, then refine the rest of the list until the flow of candidates slows to something reasonable.
You’re getting unqualified candidates
If you’re getting a large number of candidates and all of them appear to be decidedly unqualified for the position, it’s a clear sign that your job posting is too vague about the minimum requirements of the job.
In this situation you’d want to edit the position requirements to be more clear and review the preferred skills and education to see if you should upgrade them to true requirements to cut down on the unqualified candidates who are applying. You may also want to review the job title and introductory paragraph to see if there is anything that might encourage an unqualified candidate to click and submit their resume when it’s so clear that they are not qualified for the position.
If you’re fighting against these three common hiring scenarios, tweak your job posting with your overall company goals in mind to refine the candidates that respond to your post. The next post in the series will provide additional detail and examples for strategically crafting the perfect job posting.
