Your Candidates are Consumers. Period.

I want you to imagine you were a fly on the wall of the design lab when the Apple industrial design team was going over the concepts for the original iPhone.

I want you to imagine the painstaking attention paid to the smallest details. The obsession that took over the team as they looked at the shapes, contours, weights, colors, materials, buttons and screens.

Can you imagine the debates that took place about the tiniest decisions? Can you also imagine the impact that those decisions ultimately had?

The iPhone was a category-defining success because Apple never lost sight of their goal to create something revolutionary for their consumers.

In fact, Christopher Stringer, a member of Apple’s industrial design team told us exactly what the goal was with the iPhone, “We were looking for a new, original and beautiful update, something that would wow the world.”

The iPhone won because Apple was laser-focused, hyper-obsessed, with the consumer and delivering the best product they could imagine. The result? they wowed the world.

So what?

Your candidates are consumers. That’s what.

They’re consumers before, during and after their experience with your company as a candidate. They’re used to companies like Apple, Samsung, Nike, Starbucks, Johnson & Johnson, Google, LG, FitBit and Beats by Dre relentlessly focusing on creating the most delightful user experiences possible.

They browse career sites on unibody aluminum smartphones, retina displays and 32”, 4K curved desktop monitors. They understand what great user experience is. They inherently have expectations for everything they touch, swipe, tap and click.

And that’s why they hate job postings.

They hate job postings because they’re not designed, written or engineered for a consumer. Instead, they are copy-and-pasted together almost exclusively with the company in mind. The skills and requirements are worded and ordered in a way that makes sense to the recruiter, the content is placed in a way that satisfies the Talent Acquisition team and the application process approved and implemented by HR.

They hate job postings because they don’t even know how to approach them. There’s zero user-experience. There’s very limited design. We’ve seen job postings without punctuation, written in all caps, using three different fonts.

When was the last time a Talent Acquisition team obsessed over the design of a job posting, the positioning of its elements or the wording of its content? When was the last time a recruiter sweat the small stuff in their job postings? Not for the company but for the sake of the candidate’s experience?

When was the last time a company user-tested their job postings to understand how consumers interact with them? When was the last time a company set the lofty goal to wow the world with their job postings?

For your company to start crafting job postings that wow the world, you must begin approaching your candidates as consumers first. Why? Because they are. Period.

In my next post(s), I’ll look at 3 ways to start approaching your job-postings with consumer-centric focus.

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Want to know more about what we’re doing to help companies dramatically improve candidate experience and employer branding in their job postings? Head to Ruutly.com.