It’s been a few years since our original Ultimate Guide to Job Descriptions, one of our most-read blogs at Haley Marketing during the past few years.
Three years later, it’s time to provide some updated information – some areas have changed, and some have stayed the same. Let’s dig in!
What’s In It For Me?
This part isn’t going to change – it’s a long-term principle of the job posting, job description, job advertisement (choose your term).
WIIFM is for the job candidate. Not the hiring manager. Not the recruiter. Not the client. No one else. What does change is what candidates want. The principle stays true, but candidates’ desires will always evolve.
In 2022, how does WIIFM compare to what we saw in 2019?
Always Start With the Job Title
It’s natural to start at the top, and the job title is exactly that. It’s a simple adjustment, but it’s part of the job description where recruiters are really hurting themselves.
Let’s look at some examples:
- We work with a transportation staffing client that places truck drivers. In May 2021, their job titles featured “Class A Driver” or “CDL Driver.” In doing research, we saw the term “truck driver” was the most common search term. In the middle of the month, adjusting the titles to “Class A Truck Driver” and “CDL Truck Driver” brought a 12% decrease in application cost and a 42% increase in application total.
- Let’s look at an apartment staffing company – instead of just posting “leasing consultant,” our research showed the titles should be “leasing agent” or “leasing consultant hiring immediately.” That change tripled applications in the next month.
It doesn’t matter what you want the title to be. It matters what job candidates are searching for. Indeed and ZipRecruiter are like Google; they are search engines. When a candidate goes to the job aggregator to search for a job, the algorithm on Indeed and ZipRecruiter brings back the best result to that search term.
Here’s a perfect example – one of our clients asked why their marketing specialist job struggled to get applications. We did some research on what terms people were searching before clicking on a marketing specialist job posting. The top search queries were “social media,” “sports marketing,” “digital marketing” and “graphic designer.” Those aren’t the titles that match their job posting. It has nothing to do with sports or graphic design!
Reading the job posting and doing some more research, it became apparent the title of that job posting should be “marketing associate,” “marketing assistant” or “marketing coordinator.” That’s what people are searching for similar jobs to the original job description.
Remember – the title on the job description should be what your candidates are searching for. Leave the fun, unique, witty titles for the business card or email signatures.
That gets us to our second point.
Remote. Remote. Remote.
Prior to the pandemic, very few companies were fully remote. Those companies were viewed as trendy or too far ahead of the curve. More companies offered work-from-home flexibility – either a set day or days at home each week. The option to WFH on a bad weather day or a day when you might have something going on in your personal life was common as well. Other companies had a majority of their company at the headquarters and other talent scattered throughout the company or other hub cities/locations.
Since the pandemic, workers received a taste of working at home full-time, and did they enjoy that change! Take this data from Indeed as confirmation:
- At the end of November 2021, 5.6% of job-seeker queries on Indeed contained keywords related to remote work, compared to 1.9% in 2019.
- In January 2020, 2.5% of job postings contained remote terms. As of November 2021 – that total increased to 9.1%
To put in context, that’s a 264% increase in job postings with remote terms and a 195% increase in job-seeker searches related to remote work.
Let’s take it further to Haley Marketing’s data.
A professional staffing agency in Florida hires for accounting and administrative positions. They are putting remote in the job titles for the appropriate positions, and the stats speak for themselves:
- Remote Jobs: $1.34 CPA, 14.6% conversion rate, $0.20 CPC
- Non-Remote Jobs: $1.86 CPA, 11.1% conversion rate, $0.21 CPC
A difference of $0.52 may not seem like a lot, but that’s a 28% difference! The conversion rate is 31.5% higher!
Candidates want remote jobs. If you can offer remote jobs, place that word (remote, WFH, hybrid) right in the job title!
We Can’t Ignore the Application Format
Reducing friction is vitally important. We have Amazon to blame for this consumer trend making its way to the recruitment world. One click, and we can have a product at our house in two days, with Amazon striving to make that even faster.
How does that relate to job descriptions? Well, one-click apply feels like the natural progression. Here’s why.
Put yourselves in the shoes of the job seeker. They’re probably searching for jobs on their mobile device during a 10-minute stretch of free time. They don’t have their resume or CV on their mobile device. They don’t want to fill out dozens of fields on your job application.
They want to click as few buttons as possible. They want to fill out as few fields as possible. They don’t want to jump into multiple apps or even go into a different tab on their browser.
Really examine your application format – on your career portal and on any job board where you post and sponsoring jobs.
Reducing friction isn’t changing at all. Consumer behavior will always encroach on other aspects of our life. The application format is the easiest way to reduce friction.
Need Help With Your Recruitment Marketing?
At Haley Marketing, we constantly preach the four pillars of recruitment marketing – job advertising, career sites, social recruiting, and employer branding. All four pillars work together to find the right candidates for your open jobs.
Our recruitment marketing team is here to help! We’ll analyze your current recruitment marketing and deliver takeaways for your company to improve each of the four pillars. Contact our team today to get started!
