5 Ways to Optimize Your Job Posting

The employment market is changing daily. Sometimes you can get numerous qualified applicants, and sometimes you can’t. Have you considered that your job posting may not be attractive to potential applicants? Regardless of the reason, creating an engaging job posting can help you bring in more qualified candidates. Here we discuss 5 different ways to optimize your job posting to attract more applicants.

1. Schedule the Posting Time

A job posting receives most of its applications in the first 3 days. Therefore, scheduling your posting date to make full use of the first-3-day rule is critical to grab the most attention. According to Fitzii, Monday is the best day to post your job, whereas posting on Saturday would get the lowest amount of applications.

This rule is reasonable, mainly because mobile devices are widely used for job hunting. At the beginning of the week, people actively sift through social media and job boards. If you posted a job on Sunday night or Monday morning, it would stay fresh for the rest of the week. If you post on Friday, hoping that people would browse job boards and apply for openings over the weekend—which they usually do not—on Monday, your job posting will become old news from last week.

2. Introduce Your Company, But Not Too Much

When drafting your job description, including a summary of your company can flesh out your job posting. Just as you want to know more about your applicants, they also want to learn more about the company they will apply for.

Instead of simply posting a plain job description, add a brief introduction of your company’s business, organizational culture, employee benefits, etc. This gives applicants a more vivid picture of working with your company and helps them decide if they are a good fit for your organization.

However, it doesn’t mean that you should write a novel-length history about your company. On the contrary, the shorter, the better. After all, describing the position is the primary purpose here. Additionally, put the company description at the bottom of your job posting so that people can scroll down to dig for more information if they are genuinely interested.

3. Properly Allocate Duties and Qualifications

I know these are the most critical parts, but keep them simple. Imagine an applicant looks at your job description, which contains 20 bullet points of responsibilities, and 10 lines of qualifications—5 of them require at least 5 years of experience. If I were that applicant, I would instead search for other openings that could be a better fit.

What I’m trying to say here is that these two parts need to be kept short. More requirements can ensure the quality of your applicants but can also scare away those who have potential or are a good fit for your team. List the mandatory requirements, make long sentences short, bold the keywords if necessary, then you will receive more qualified applications.

4. List the Salary or Not?

Personally, I am not in favour of mentioning pay range on job postings. But if you want to restrain the quality of your applicants, stating the salary of your position might be a good choice.

People may argue that not listing salary would bring all levels of applicants, which makes the screening process more difficult. However, if you list the pay range on job postings, firstly, you may lose the leverage of negotiation (when it becomes necessary); secondly, you disclose your company’s pay scales to your competitors.

5. Choose the Right Job Boards

There are many other job boards than Indeed, Monster, Workopolis and LinkedIn, that you can use to target a specific group of talents. But how do you choose them wisely?

Take the role of Java Developer as an example. It is an IT position, and there are some job boards you can use to post this specific type of position. Websites such as Dice, GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc., are great places to find highly qualified technical talents. If you are hiring for a Designer position, you may want to publish your job posting on sites like Behance, Dribbble, and Authentic Jobs.

A neatly composed job posting can attract more qualified applicants and help enhance the company’s image. Employer branding? An excellent way to start is to optimize your job posting!