The Final Mile of Candidate Experience — The Job Posting
When we started down the path of launching Ruutly, we spent quite a bit of time talking with the industry experts we believed could offer insights that we may have otherwise overlooked.
We made a list of people we thought would be a match. Then, we dove in and ate up all of the content we could find from the people on our list. We watched the panel discussions, listened to the podcasts, read the tweets, gobbled up the blogs and then reached out directly.
We were blown away by the openness and genuine willingness to help. As we went through our list, we ended every conversation with the question, “is there anybody else you think we should be connecting with?” and I kid you not, 80% of our list answered, “William Tincup”.
By the time we set up a call with him, we’d heard his name so much, it felt like a meeting with the Oracle.
We talked about the industry and then we demoed Ruutly. William asked some great questions, gave some great advice and then finished the call by imparting this:
I totally get what you guys are working on. Ruutly is the last mile of candidate experience.
We finished up the chat and it wasn’t until after our conversation I realized just how accurate that statement was.
Now I understand why everybody told us we needed to connect with him. There was so much truth in the way William framed his understanding of Ruutly.
How many companies spend thousands of dollars of their Talent Acquisition budgets on launching new, beautiful career pages? How many companies pour money into job posting credits? How many companies make sure their ATS is current and providing a solid application process? How many are making sure their HRIS is making on-boarding and the post-hire process enjoyable?
And how many of those same companies are copying and pasting their job postings from a template that somebody wrote years ago? Or using purely (and usually poorly-formatted) text job postings?
How many companies are completely overlooking, flat-out ignoring, or simply don’t know the best practices when it comes to candidate experience in job postings?
Because here’s the deal, if you’re spending money on job ads on LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Indeed or any other job posting site, candidates aren’t seeing your beautiful career site. They aren’t learning about your benefits. They don’t get to see the diverse workforce and brilliant culture that your company is building. They are either a) applying directly through the 3rd party site or b) landing directly on the corresponding job posting. And chances are, that posting is completely void of your employer brand.
It’s 2018 and for some reason, job postings look and feel like they’re stuck in the 1990’s.
There’s a massive opportunity for you to use your job postings to tell your brand story. Companies like Cactus Club get this. I mean just look at their job postings. Companies like T-Mobile are using their job postings to blow candidates away and give them the info that they may otherwise not see if they’re landing directly on a job posting. See for yourself! And Diply (full disclosure: Diply is a customer of Ruutly) uses their job postings to show their personality and share their story in every single posting. Here’s an example.
And if you’re using a modern ATS with an accessible API, making these changes to your job postings doesn’t take a lot of effort, time or money. It doesn’t require any fancy software. It requires you to take an audit of your job postings and then identify what kind of experience you want candidates to have and what story you want to tell.
Your company is undoubtedly doing so many things right in the Talent Acquisition department. But are you skipping the last mile of candidate experience and celebrating a bit too early?
Are your job postings matching the expectations your candidates have as consumers? Are your job postings giving candidates the information and the experience they need to make a truly-informed decision of whether the role and your company are a fit?
You’ve run 99% of the race and you owe it to your candidates and your team to complete the last mile, because that’s where you’ll find the greatest opportunity to delight your candidates, attract the best talent and stand out from other companies kicking their feet up 100m from the finish line.
If you like what you’ve just read, go ahead and clap a few times for us to let us know that you enjoy content like this. And if you have any questions for me, head over to Ruutly.com and chat with us.
