Stop all the Creative Writing in Job Postings

We get it — as a recruiter, you want your job posting to stand out in a sea of job openings. Like apples being picked over in the produce section of a supermarket, you want the look and the feel of your offering to catch the eyes and touch the hearts of job seekers. Whether the job seeker is actively seeking new opportunities or passively grazing, you want potential job seekers to pause and take more than the 14 seconds that researchers say they are spending to look at your job postings. Here are some tips to help you be more effective with your job postings.

Rein in the AI Tools

For those of you using artificial intelligence tools to over do the verbal gymnastics used in some job postings, please rein those in. Please err on the side of simpler and clearer descriptions of the duties and responsibilities. Job seekers are cynical and mostly skeptical about what they might be reading. They know the stories of fantastic hiring processes that lead to less than perfect work environments. Therefore, stay simpler to build more trust. You don’t want job seekers using up your 14 seconds to read and reread lines and sentences that are overworked. 

Write Clear Job Titles

Make sure the job title is related to the actual duties as best as you can. Put yourself in the shoes of the job seeker and use job titles as a breadcrumb trail to lead them into the opportunity.

We see it all the time at The HBCU Career Center — employers post jobs with vague titles and even harder to understand acronyms. We often have to translate these titles into something more appealing and effective when we promote the jobs in newsletters and on social media. For example, instead of just writing “Researcher”, you could say “Researcher of Women’s Studies”.

Again, if you keep the idea of building trust in mind, the job title should seamlessly connect to the job at hand. If that doesn’t happen, your job seeker inevitably backs out to check if they had actually clicked on the right job.

This goes for keywords also. Make sure they are relevant and will connect with the audience you are seeking.

A Word About Qualifications

If the job title is the invitation, the duties and responsibilities are the meat and potatoes, the qualifications are the open door for your job seekers to just walk right in. Try hard for your expected qualifications to be real. Do you really need a Computer Science degree? Do you really expect five years of work experience in a specific field? Stay open to what might be possible. If you are working with hiring managers who are bent on what they want because they are trying to find a unicorn, then you will have to explain to them the delay that comes when your qualifications are restricting how far that door can open.  

This is by no means to say that companies should not be clear on what is necessary to succeed in a role. I am just asking that you consider a wider net where possible. 

Job postings are such a key part of the job search, that it makes sense to spend the time editing and putting yourself in the job seekers’ shoes. The article linked above, offers other creative ways including video, cartoons and infographics to get more eyeballs on your job postings.

However, just in case you are sticking with the tried and true, just think about how you can make 14 seconds work for you. Just like how recruiters tell job seekers that we only have 6 seconds to look at their resumes, job seekers are turning the tables and telling recruiters: you have 14 seconds of my time — show me what you got!!