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Job Listing Tips Job Listing/Advertising For The Best Employee Talent When listing or posting a job on the internet, newspaper, or engaging a third party recruiter (headhunter) to help with the hiring process, there are several things to think about when trying to recruit the best talent: The best candidates are usually already employed. The first step in the posting process is to arouse a candidate’s interest in leaving his or her current employer. The listing or posting must contain information about your company that sets your organization apart from his or her present employer. In the current environment most people that are not actively seeking a new job have the attention span of a gnat when looking at job listings. It is not enough to describe the benefits your company has over their present employer. Their attention must be caught very quickly. The best candidates are rarely looking for a job. They are looking for career advancement or an opportunity for career advancement. This means the listing must present bothcareer and professional challenges and growth opportunities very quickly and right up front. No matter how much money or how many opportunities you offer, the best candidate will be looking for a position that provides personal fulfillment, if not love (not necessarily in the Biblical sense). Many job seekers are Boolean illiterate or do not know how to employ the concept well because they rarely apply for jobs on line. To compensate for the lack of Boolean skills, job listing should remove as many Boolean or keyword usage as possible. The purpose of advertising is to get the best candidate to leave his present company where they work for your company. Job postings started in England when textile companies who were looking for workers nailed a brief job description with the hourly rate on a board in the local town square (similar to student boards at present day universities). Due primarily to the custom of newspapers to charge for job postings by the word or letter, job postings did not change much in the Twentieth Century. Most job postings or listings continued to be very brief to hold down costs. The advent of Internet based job boards at the end of the Twentieth Century (electronic versions of the English town square job boards) should have given job posters to stage to write long and beautiful prose describing the job, the benefits of working for the company, and personal fulfillment (think feeling of being loved) the job will bestow on the individual honored by being hired. Alas, even Al Gore’s brilliant invention of the Internet with its almost unlimited ability to distribute large quantities of text and pictures, has not resulted in anything approaching a quantum leap in the quality of job postings. Just listing the job description (yawn!), the annual salary range, and a listing of benefits is just not enough. The job posting must contain enough interesting information to get the best candidate to respond to the posting. Recruiters cannot intuitively determine those factors, and hiring mangers, despite what they may think, are almost always clueless. Go to the individuals that have accepted the position in the past and determine what made them say YES to the company’s offer and emphasize those points in the job posting. Catching The Best Talent’s Attention Rapidly Is Mission Critical The best candidate is usually just scanning the job postings to reassure themselves that they are working at the best job for the best company possible. They are impatient and not easily impressed. Offers come to them so going to a job board, listing their resume with a recruiter, or looking at an employer’s web site to read a job listing and expecting them to jump through hoops to respond is just not going to happen. In order to eliminate or reduce that reticence search for jobs, postings must pack a lot of power beginning with the title and the first five lines. The title must be catchy, very descriptive, and have as few words as possible. "Second Shift Supervisor" does not get it done when what your really want is a "Self Motivated Leader of Injection Molding Shift Operations". The first line should begin with powerful and compelling reasons stating why the opening is a dream position. The dream position state should be followed by a statement of why the organization is a dream employer, e.g. "Our policy is to promote from within and the company President serves ice cream to the employees every Friday afternoon." A statement of compensation and benefits in numbers instead of terms such as competitive. Where the position will lead or has led in the past (unless it is a revolving door position and then you might not need the best talent anyway). A statement of where the position is located and why anyone would want to live there would be a "good thing." Career and/or Professional Opportunities Are Very Important to Top Talent The best people are usually trying to improve themselves professionally and/or their ranking in the organization. To get the best talent’s attention and get them to respond to the job posting, they need to know more than the position responsibilities. They want to know: What will they get to do that will increase their skills and value to the organization and/or their profession (organization and professional skills are not always mutually inclusive)? Will they receive additional training and be allowed to attend professional association meetings and trade shows? What will they have the opportunity to learn from the job and their managers and coworkers. Is there any recognition within the organization or profession for exceptional effort and knowledge? What experience is needed to be able to excel at the new position? Where can their best efforts take them within the organization? Top Talent Needs Some Indication They Can Obtain Personal Fulfillment From The Job Let’s face it, everyone not just top talent, needs to obtain personal fulfillment from his/her job. We all spend too much time working for a living to not need personal fulfillment from his/her job. Even a janitor can feel personal fulfillment from a job well done, especially if someone takes time to praise them for their effort. Any indication in the job posting that an employee’s efforts will be appreciated and rewarded is a definite plus. Make The Posting Easy To Find, Minimize The Need For Boolean Searches Even my wife can do Boolean searches (seven years ago she told me Discovery Personnel Inc. did not need a web site because no one in the plastics industry would ever use the Internet to find a job) so the need to eliminate, or at least reduce, the need for candidates to use Boolean searches to find postings is probably not as important as previously. Just in case the candidate you want is not Boolean literate here are a few tips: Pick a title that highlights the key motivating factor you identified when talking to the people who said YES to the same or similar position in your organization in the past. Make the title as job specific as possible. Place an unique job order number or at the end of the posting so if the candidate is being referred to the posting by a friend or colleague they can use the job order number to look up the posting instead of doing a keyword or Boolean search. If the date is included in the unique job order alphanumeric, this will also help the person doing the posting when several years later someone applies for a job using the job alphanumeric and you will know that the job is not longer active and why. I am sure I have overlooked some job posting tips, but if your keep these tips in mind when preparing a job posting or giving a listing of job requirements and benefits to the third party recruiter you are hiring, you should achieve good results. If you have any questions about this article or if you would like help with preparing a job posting, please give Jim Heilman a call at (952) 431-2500 or send an email to jim@discoverypersonnel.com. Discovery Personnel, Inc. P.O. Box 1228 Burnsville, MN 55337 Phone: (952) 431-2500 Fax: (952) 431-2726 E-mail: jobs@discoverypersonnel.com Discovery Personnel, Inc. does not discriminate, or recruit for companies that discriminate, in employment based upon race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical disability or marital status. © 1998 - 2009 Discovery Personnel, Inc.