It’s Not Them, It’s You: Why Your Job Posts Alienate the Best Talent.

Have you ever wondered why the crème de la crème of Europe’s tech talent isn’t forming a raucous queue outside your interview room, falling over each other to land a job at your company? Well, recent research suggests that, if this isn’t happening, it’s not because your company isn’t cool enough. Actually, the real problem might be more simple than you realize — it’s the way you’re advertizing your vacancies.

“You really need to focus on what you’re going to do for applicants.”— Professor David Jones, University of Vermont School of Business Administration.

Think about most of the job adverts you’ve ever seen, applied to or written personally. Most of them will have had something in common: they dictate to applicants what the company wants or needs from them, like a grocery list of skills, qualifications and other requirements.

For a company boss or HR manager looking to fill a role, this might make sense. But researchers have poked their noses into this a little more and found that this approach might actually be putting off the a good chunk of the very individuals it is supposed to seduce.

The job market is getting tighter these days, which means the most talented candidates have a bit more of a choice about where they want to work and are often afforded the luxury of picking and choosing from multiple job offers. Therefore, when trying to coax them into becoming part of our teams, we as companies need to start putting ourselves in the shoes (or battered Converse sneakers) of the applicants themselves.

In the end, writing a decent job ad and attracting the kind of candidates we actually want comes back to one simple question: What does our company have to offer to the best talent out there…?

In other words: it’s not about us; it’s about them.

“You really need to focus on what you’re going to do for applicants,” David Jones — who’s a professor at the University of Vermont’s School of Business Administration and the author of the research paper — told the Wall Street Journal recently.

His study found that shifting our mindsets and placing the onus on what we bring to the table — like career growth and the opportunity to make a real impact, for example — can have a dramatic and positive influence on the quality of applicants knocking at our doors.

You can read more about the study when it is eventually published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Business and Psychology, but the long-and-short of it is this: after re-writing a selection from 56 job ads and reviewing the results, Professor Jones and his team found a huge difference not only in the volume of candidates applying, but also in their quality when the job ads were more ‘candidate-centered’.

The re-written, candidate-centered job ads placed the spotlight on how much opportunity there was for things like advancement in the role, how much freedom or self-sufficiency it afforded, and how important the role was within the company. Some included statements like:

“You will have the opportunity to work on a variety of tasks and develop your skills in many areas…” “We seek to provide employees with constructive feedback to foster their career growth…” “You will have many opportunities to collaborate with talented people…”

On the flipside, the more company-centric job posts were more concerned with what was required of the candidates and how they were expected to perform in the role. They made statements like:

“The successful applicant will have excellent written and verbal communication skills…” “Job incumbents will be required to show initiative in prioritizing tasks and carrying them through to completion…” “The successful applicant will enthusiastically support and cooperate with others to develop effective solutions…”

All-in-all, 991 candidates sent in applications (to both styles of job post). From the candidate–centered job ads, an average of 1.37 candidates per position were deemed of the necessary standard or quality for the role, compared with 0.48 for the ads that were focussed on the company’s requirements.

The bigger picture, however, reveals something about the way we write our job ads. We often (understandably) focus on trying to plug a skills gap and end up forgetting to take a step back and look at it from the POV of the talent we’re trying to attract.

So next time we’re faced with the task of writing a job post that appeals to the very best candidates, perhaps we should keep the following firmly in mind:

Applicants looking at a job opportunity have limited information.

Remember: the very best talent out there is already confident in and aware of their capability to perform the role to which they’re considering applying. So the number one question in their mind is: “Is this a place where I want to work?”.

Your Company Page will go some way towards helping prospective candidates figure that part out; the rest is down to the way the role is advertized and, thereafter, the interview process.

For top talent, applying is a choice; give them room to make the right one…

When all’s said and done, candidates who possess real talent, quality and experience will be in high demand and will have caught the eye of a number of prospective company suitors — so it’s us that needs to convince them why they should apply to our company specifically.

We can do this by focusing on what we’ll be able to offer them in return for their skills and expertise — room to breathe, room to grow, and room to learn and develop in their chosen career path. That’s what working at startups is all about.

We need to try to make it less about what we want.

When you’ve written your job post, step back and read it back to yourself, imagining that you are the ideal candidate for the role.

Ask yourself not only whether it’s the kind of role you’ll enjoy doing, but also if it’s the kind of company and environment you’ll love doing it in. If you can answer “yes” to both questions, you should expect to receive more applications from candidates of a high quality when you hit the publish button.

Of course, there is a lot more to writing a great job post; this is just the beginning. We’d love to know if applying any of these insights to your candidate search produces any positive changes, so please let us know in the comments section, or drop us a line any time.

Stay with us for more tips on hiring the best talent, coming soon to the Tyba Blog.

Words: Chuk Ikéh

Originally published at blog.tyba.com on March 3, 2015.