Is Your Ego Sabotaging Your Candidate Search?

When you’re writing a job posting for the entire world to see, are you creating a list of your company’s wants and needs with needless jargon? Are you barely writing any content and hope that the candidates just flow? Or are you writing a job posting meant to entice the reader into applying for your job?

I hope you chose the last option, because just like writing copy to excite clients about your product, you have to write a job posting that will market your job to the masses!

You can’t think about yourself in your job posting. You have to think about your candidate. Get your ego out of the way, and write your job posting like a slick piece of sales copy.

A job listing IS marketing!

Just as you fight for clients, you have to fight for the best candidates. You can’t think about a job posting as just a checklist of things you want as an employer. You NEED to get into the head of your candidates, and play to THEIR egos. Make your job listing so desirable that your ideal candidate couldn’t think of applying to another company! Make other companies jealous of how great your company looks to work for! And you can do that by creating…

A Customer Avatar

Here’s an exercise: visualize your ideal candidate, and what they’d want to read in a job posting. In marketing speak, this is called a “Customer Avatar.” But for now, we’ll call it our “Candidate Avatar.”

So think about your ideal candidate…

Go ahead. Do it. I’ll wait.

Ok, got that exact person in your head?

Does that ideal candidate want to go through a list of industry buzzwords and self-aggrandizing statements? NO! They want to know how this job is going to stimulate them in a career, and help them get the things they want out of their professional life! They want to be a part of a company that they can be proud of and tell their mothers about, so put THAT aspirational pride in your job posting.

How does your ideal candidate think? What words and phrases speak to them on an emotional level? If you were this ideal candidate, what is the job posting that they would write about him or herself?

How you word your job posting is just as important as the details you include in it.

Applying For a Job Shouldn’t Be Harder Than The Job Itself

I’ve seen countless companies fill their job postings with HUNDREDS of requirements and job duties that aren’t relevant to the job itself. But the only reason these companies make an endless list of items is to play to their own hiring and company ego.

Solution: KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid! The more hurdles you put into in the text of your job posting, the less candidates are going to want to apply for your job.

And I hear you: yes. You should represent the real needs and requirements of your company.

But just as in marketing you want to convert clients to sales, in Hiring Success, you want to convert potential candidates to applied candidates.

SmartRecruiters is built to get more candidates applying for your jobs by removing application friction. We make it easy by reducing the cumbersome steps it takes to apply.

Once you get your ego out of the game, you can fight for the top talent, and make your employees the lifeblood of the success of your company. Hiring success = company success!