Tim Jubb |

Candidate attraction techniques broadly fall into two categories: proactive sourcing and passive sourcing. There are pros and cons to both methods, of course. Proactive techniques are time and labour intensive, and difficult to scale. Passive sourcing is less labour intensive and easier to scale.

Traditionally, recruiters have relied on passive techniques to attract talent such as job posts and job descriptions. Passive techniques are ideal in an employer lead market- where candidates are abundant, the employer can expect lots of applications from qualified candidates. However in a candidate driven market, where candidates are scarce, a mixture of proactive and passive sourcing techniques are required to find the candidates for your position.

But with proactive techniques being so time-consuming, optimizing your passive sourcing techniques could be a time and cost effective way to continue attracting the right kind of talent. The humble job description still has value in 2017, but you need to make sure your job copy is on point. Here are our 6 keys to accurate job posting designed to attract the most suitable candidates.

1. Spelling and Grammar

A grammatically correct job post instantly has a head start against those that are littered with errors. While no one will ever commend you on making a grammatically correct job description, an error filled post stands out. In a bad way. Don't do it. Use a spell checker. 
While your recruitment software should have a spell checker built in to the text editor. If not, Grammarly provide an excellent (and free) chrome plugin. 

2. Salary Information…

If "£neg" is your idea of salary information in a job post then this could be the reason you're struggling to attract the right level of candidate. Include salary information in your job post in order to attract the right level of talent. 

3. …And Benefits to boot

Do you offer an awesome list of benefits? If you do, include them on the job description in order to attract the right level of candidate can be a great way to improve the quality of candidates that apply for your vacancy.

4. Watch your gender bias

You job descriptions might be inadvertently deterring female candidates. Based on research from academics, females could be deterred from applying from job descriptions that are overloaded with masculine coded words. To find out if your job description is gender biased, go to eploy.co.uk/checkmyjob/ 

5. Personality Traits

Here's a great example of how to put a personality description into a job description:
"A poised and sophisticated sense of personal style are important for this role; friendliness and high standards are non-negotiable."

Do you include personality expectations in your job descriptions?

6. Length

All of this should bump up the word count of your job descriptions- and that's no bad thing. Our own research has shown that the average job description is just 2532 characters. That might sound like a lot but job board Appcast.io believe that job descriptions that are between 4000 and 5000 characters can receive a click through rate that is double that achieved by job descriptions in the 2000-3999 range. 

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