Let’s Bring Job Ads Out of 1996
The year was 1996. Moms and dads were learning how to send their first emails. Millions of people were cheering for Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the NBA championships. Bill Clinton was re-elected. Seinfeld, Friends and E.R. dominated Thursday primetime and everybody and their grandma were doing the Macarena. And companies were taking full advantage of the new idea of recruiting online using job ads that looked like this:
It’s 2017. Lebron is King. I can answer emails on my wrist. Technology touches everything. People are connected to every device possible (smart mattress cover anyone?) We’ve optimized so many elements of our day-to-day lives and enhanced countless aspects of business, growth and development. But somehow, 20 years later, companies are still recruiting online using job advertisements that look like this:
Why are we still advertising jobs like this?
Everything else has changed. The way we use the internet, the sheer volume of job boards, the competition for attention, the design expectation of consumers and not to mention, the jobs themselves, have all changed drastically.
A report by TheLadders.com found that the average time a potential applicant spends on a job ad they’re not interested in, is 49 seconds. And if they think the job is a fit? 76 seconds.
Think about that: potential applicants are not even spending a full minute on an ad before deciding if it’s a fit. This means that companies have 49 seconds to entice great candidates to apply and prompt poor candidates to self-select out.
What’s the best way to get relevant information to a candidate and show them the possibilities of working with a company? With 21 bullet points, 800 words and bold headings? Maybe that was the way to do it in 1996 but it’s 2017, we can do better. We must do better.
How? Well, I’m glad you asked.
There are 3 things any company can start doing today to bring their recruiting efforts into present day.
1) Show them a path
It is absolutely critical that a company sells an applicant not only the current opening, but what a future with their company could look like. And the best way to do that is, to show applicants a career path. Job-seekers want to know there’s a career path for them. They want reassurance that this won’t be a dead-end job and that the opportunity for real advancement exists.
In a recent Harvard Business Review survey of three generations of workers, all responded with “Opportunity to Learn and Grow” and “Opportunity for Advancement” as two of their top answers to what they look for when applying for a job.
Imagine the impact that showing applicants a career path could have on your recruiting process! Imagine how different it is interviewing an applicant who came through a job posting with a clear path mapped. They enter that interview aware, and maybe even excited, about the opportunity to grow with your company.
How would that impact your hiring, interviewing and on-boarding process?
From the first interview, your conversation could immediately shift from, “can you lift 50 lbs?” and “can you work weekends?” to “we saw you’re interested in becoming a regional manager, what about that path gets you excited?”, “let’s talk about what we need from you to get you there” and “here’s how much time we expect from you in this position before you will accumulate the experience needed for the next level”.
From there, every performance review, 1-on-1 and work related conversation has immediate context. You know what they’re looking forward to. You’ve established expectations. You can now check-in with them to chart progress, identify gaps and understand if they’re still excited about the path they were hired for.
The bottom line is this: if you’re not showing potential applicants a career path, you’re missing out on a huge group of job-seekers of all ages, who are filtering their application choices based on whether or not there’s room for advancement. Show them that opportunity exists, or they’re on to the next one.
2) Give applicants the context
A few months ago, I missed a connecting flight through Vancouver on my way to Tokyo. While standing in line to collect my hotel voucher, I overheard the customer service agent dealing with a young husband and wife who had also missed a connection. Things seemed to be going as you would expect until the husband erupted in anger and shouted “I WORK IN CUSTOMER SERVICE AND THIS, THIS IS NOT CUSTOMER SERVICE!”
And it made me think. What is customer service? For the airline, customer service may be to deal with every customer in less than 5 minutes and send them on their way, happy or not. For a small local bakery, customer service may be to deal with every customer with love and a smile and spend as much time as you need to make sure they leave happier than when they entered the bakery. And we’ve all heard the inspiring stories of customer service coming from Zappos, like the customer service call that lasted 10(!) hours.
The point is, the skills and experience you have listed on your job postings have ZERO context. They. Mean. Nothing.
If you’re going to list “customer service” or “leadership” or “communication” as required skills on your job posting, tell an applicant exactly what those things mean in your company. Give them examples or successful case studies. Share a story or two. Make sure they know exactly how people in your company demonstrate those skills because if you don’t, you will leave those words up to interpretation and the applicant will misinterpret them far more often than not.
3) Show, don’t tell.
You have 49 seconds to show potential applicants that there’s opportunity or they’re gone.
The average person reads about 200 words per minute. In 49 seconds, the time it takes somebody to decide if the job is for them or not, an average person can read 163 words. You have 163 words to entice the right applicant to read on or apply and to influence the wrong candidates to self-select out.
I ran a search for “Customer Service” on Indeed.com and pulled the first three job postings to do a word count. 643, 509 and 881 words respectively. Hardly a scientific experiment but it gives you a small glimpse into how much of an ad could get missed. In the three that I found, at bare minimum, 2/3’s of the ad wouldn’t get read. What’s worse, in the same report that taught us applicants only spend 49 seconds on a job ad before making a decision, we also learned that they spend the majority of that time, above the fold or at the top of the job ad.
Why not use images to convey critical information?
Before Ruutly.com existed, as part of RaiseYourFlag.com’s offering, we built custom embeddable career paths that could live inside a job board, careers page or ATS. Air Canada was one of the first companies to jump on board and embed the visual career paths into a handful of job ads. The results were astounding.
In just 12 weeks, job-seekers interacted with Air Canada’s career paths over 500,000 times. The average visitor clicked through the path 7 times and stayed on the job posting for an average of 90+ seconds.
A simple, interactive career path at the top of a job posting, almost doubled the time the average job seeker stayed on the page. And the Air Canada visitors weren’t simply reading text, they were actively learning about the opportunity.
In this case, a picture (or interactive iframe) is truly worth a thousand words. Why? Because an image can communicate critically important information, that’s usually buried in a job ad, much more quickly than the job ad itself.
I’m not going to get into the research about visual learners and how much more effective images are than words because I think you get the point. If you truly want to update the way you’re recruiting, an easy way to make a huge step towards the right decade is by including imagery in your job postings.
Take a look around. Nobody is doing the Macarena (please tell me nobody is doing the Macarena!), your mom knows how to send an email, and Michael Jordan hasn’t stepped on an NBA court in years. It’s time to start updating the way that we’re approaching online job advertising. It doesn’t mean overhauling your entire HR team, replacing your ATS and coding a new website. You can start today, where you are, with what you have, in very little time.
The phrase “a little effort goes a long way” is exponentially true here. Next time you’re updating your online job ads, show the opportunities, give some context and show some imagery and not only will your postings be much more effective, you’ll be positioning yourself far ahead of the rest of the employers who have been doing the same thing online since the 90’s.
