We live in a culture of immediacy. We’re multi-tasking masters. We get maps, taxis, and dates with just a few swipes of a screen. We consume news in tweet-sized tidbits. We watch ten-second videos that disappear. It’s a world filled with distractions galore.
In this time of shortened attention spans and limited patience, people aren’t as inclined to wade through lengthy job postings. They want postings they can easily scan and analyze quickly to decide if it matches their career aspirations.
In this culture of immediacy, how can your HR department pitch a job effectively? Learn how to write job descriptions for a culture of now.
Design your job posting for mobile devices
There’s a good chance that potential employees will first read about your organization’s job opportunity on their smartphone or tablet. This means it’s essential to optimize your job posting for mobile devices.
Often, a mobile device screen view will squish text into a narrow column. If your sentences and paragraphs are over long, they’ll transform into a dreaded “wall of text” that is agonizing to read on mobile devices.
Edit your job description so it’s as short as possible. Use short sentences in paragraphs of no more than two to four sentences. If information tangential to the job posting is available elsewhere online, include a link to it rather than reiterating it at length. Make the posting easier to scan by breaking information into sections, each topped with a bold, short heading (like this article does).
Reprioritize and reorganize your information
Job postings often begin with a long “About our organization” boilerplate section. While a short description of your organization might belong somewhere in your job posting, it’s usually not what people are most interested in.
According to CareerBuilder's 2016 Candidate Behavior study, job candidates are most interested in salary, benefits, day-to-day job duties, and required versus optional skills. Further down the list of priorities, but still important are employer ratings, work flexibility options, work-life balance, photos and videos of the workplace, and team structure.
You don’t necessarily need to include all that information in that specific order. Instead, think about what your ideal candidate most wants to know about the job. Put the most important details about the specific job at the beginning. Leave generic content for the end—or better yet, leave it off altogether.
Evaluate the first impression the posting makes
When you work in HR, by the time you’ve drafted and revised your organization’s job posting, you are too familiar with it to see its faults. You need fresh, impartial eyes to spot the posting’s strengths and weaknesses.
Get feedback from people outside of HR. You can ask a stellar employee who embodies your ideal candidate to point out what parts of the job posting grab their attention and what parts drag. Or, you might ask someone who doesn’t work for your organization to review the job posting and share their honest first impressions.
Write a social-media sized job posting
Think about social media shares you’ve seen used to advertise job openings. They’re usually along the lines of:
“JOB POSTING: Click here to apply online for job opportunity SENIOR LEVEL II MANAGER [GOVERNMENT] JOB #2184828129 http://www.forgettablejobs…”
That’s a lot of words, but little helpful information that will entice job candidates. Instead, make your social pitches sizzle with exciting details, natural language, and an appeal to people’s emotions. Take a crack at writing compelling teasers for the job posting for various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Choose powerful words and your organization’s job posting will break through the culture of immediacy.
