Employers often assume that the best job description comes with good perks, and eye-catching facts about a company. However, focussing only on these things, you can miss out on highly experienced developers who read between the lines. To help you avoid this mistake and create a strong vacancy description we showcase the most frequent errors and give recommendations 💜
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When you compile a list of a candidate’s responsibilities or qualifications, you might want to add every little thing that a person will execute. That’s a bad idea. You will see a negative outcome.
The more skills you demand, the fewer candidates you’ll get. Harvard Business Review investigated that women, for instance, tend to put off a vacancy if they don’t possess 100% of the necessary skills.
In addition, redundancies make your vacancy hard to digest. Abundant characteristics and lengthy sentences motivate a potential applicant to switch to the next vacancy.
Job seekers tend to skim the vacancy rather than read it closely. An average candidate spends from 0.41 to 1.4 min scanning a vacancy, as a job-search firm TheLadders reports.
Thus, if you skip insignificant points and use shorter sentences, you will increase the likelihood of new hires.
Try to shape your job description section in the following way:
If you want to draft a concise vacancy, you probably doubt which information to include. Everything seems to be important. It’s especially true for your hallmarks, testimonials, and rewards. Meanwhile, these attributes are less important than you might think.
Every applicant at first wants to know what’s there for them. To personalize your job description, from the first lines you can show the benefits that a person will gain.
Meanwhile, when you accentuate only material benefits it indicates a poor company culture. For instance, such vacancies can discourage candidates who gravitate towards laid back culture.
To meet the needs of qualified IT workers, try to consider why they quit their previous jobs. The survey reveals that there are two major reasons:
Consequently, the majority of tech experts search for both feeling of progression (or excitement) and a convivial atmosphere (or involvement) in a new workplace. Don’t lose the opportunity and demonstrate these traits in your job description. The questions below will help you.
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Consequently, the majority of tech experts search for both feeling of progression (or excitement) and a convivial atmosphere (or involvement) in a new workplace. Don’t lose the opportunity and demonstrate these traits in your job description. The questions below will help you.
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To differentiate your company, you might want to embellish a vacancy description with superlative adjectives. For example, using “the best of the best” or “the number one” instead of real market share or years in the industry. However, that creates the opposite effect.
Superlatives are overused. Taking a quick look at the vacancy, an experienced candidate will think that a characteristic is overblown and misleading. So, this wording can spoil the first impression about your company and rob you of lots of good candidates.
There is another trap related to tricky job titles. Making their try to be different and friendly, some recruiters publish vacancies under unordinary names like Data Engineer “ninja” or a “Guru” of HW/SW Integration. But that extra words confuse applicants. Weird job titles make them doubt what to expect and hesitate about their own abilities.
In addition, an untypical job title might drop out of sight of a candidate. A person who looks for possibilities for middle Java developers might not see the position of “Java developer rockstar” in the search results. That is why irrelevant words can negatively affect your hiring results.
Companies often ignore sharing a payment range in the vacancy, though it has a significant impact on candidates’ decisions. According to SHRM and Glassdoor studies, compensation is a top factor that about 70% of candidates are looking for.
Even so, according to Payscale, only 12% of international companies advertise salaries in their vacancy postings. So, you have a chance to stand out from other employers and give people a clear understanding of a salary range.
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In such fields as engineering and programming, a subtle gender bias might appear. Still, technical roles are often associated with men.
Even if a company shares the diversity values, there might be a contradiction in the language patterns they use. Mentioning in job description such adjectives as self-sufficient or decisive for women candidates can lower the sense of fitting to the job profile.
Moreover, the research shows that gender-neutral language can help companies attract 42% more candidates.
To fill vacancies faster, try to exclude masculine-coded words from your vacancy. Here are some of them:
To find more examples, look at Gender Decoder, or simply test your job description in a gender-bias checker.
The number of open positions in tech teams still growing, according to a survey. With that tendency, employers can avail static job descriptions that don’t change over time. As a result, developers scan hundreds of more or less generic vacancies. But you can bolster your job description using this method.
To differentiate from the rest, you can adjust the vacancy wording with an ideal candidate profile and make it more appealing to them.
Are you looking for a creative mind that spurs innovations? Then add some portion of creativity to your job description.
If you want to turn to more traditional candidates that are expected to configure existing software, so use more conventional words.
Sometimes employers expect too much from applicants. It might reflect in asking a novice to have extensive experience in X tech skills. Or expect a worthy developer to do clerical work like taking meeting minutes. Those inconsistencies create a negative impression and discourage candidates to apply.
To find more examples, look at Gender Decoder, or simply test your job description in a gender-bias checker.
Inevitably, an applicant compares numerous employers. But you can make clarity your trump card. Clear and concise vacancy descriptions allow you to earn the trust of tech experts.
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