Whether you work for a recruitment agency or you’re recruiting for your own company, you might think that the quality of applicants is simple luck. However, it's a fact that you can directly control whether you get good applicants or bad ones, simply by changing your job advertisement.
Give the Right Details
The easiest way to improve the standard of job applicants is to ensure that you only receive suitable applications. Make sure that your job advert contains details not just about the kind of person that you want to employ, but also about what you’re able to offer them. Include a salary, or at least a useful salary range, so that you’re not getting applications from anyone too experienced or not experienced enough.
Advertise in the Right Places
Every job is different, and to get the best candidates you’ll need to advertise your jobs so that the right kinds of people can see them. You can use social networks to target your ideal candidates, or work with a specialist recruitment agency rather than a general one. As an example, a marketing recruitment agency or creative recruitment company might place your advertisement online and on Twitter to reach young people that might be best suited to the role. If you’re trying to hire someone with 40 years of experience, then Twitter might be the last place you want to advertise your vacancy. Spend some time deciding who you want to target, and discovering how you’ll be able to reach them.
Give the Best People a Reason to Choose You
When you’re advertising a job vacancy, it’s important to not be arrogant. Don’t assume that people want to work for your company. Instead, give the best candidates a reason to want to work for you.
Nowadays, candidates care about company culture. They want somewhere that they’ll enjoy working, and they want to work for a company with beliefs that match their own. The average person spends upwards of 60% of their time working and travelling to/from the office in a typical week – their job is a big part of their life, and as an employer you’ll attract the best candidates by fitting into their lives rather than working against them.
Even big businesses, like Google, know that they need to sell their company culture. They promote benefits ranging from travel insurance and on-site healthcare to reimbursements that cover the costs of degree courses and extra classes. They want their employees to better themselves, and they even pay a bonus to cover the cost of a new baby rather than pushing new parents to the back of the line because they’ll need some time off work.
The right benefits don’t just attract the right people – they also ensure that the right people stick around, because they feel valued and cared for.
Let Candidates Be Themselves
All too often, job applications come with a list of essential and desired traits that can look daunting to even the most skilled and experienced jobseekers. Add enough ‘desired’ traits, and you seem to be targeting one specific person. Other valuable candidates will skip your advertisement, because they don’t feel that they’re the individual with every single one of those traits.
Don’t make your job advert so prescriptive that the perfect person passes it by. If you can list just the essential traits, and leave the desired traits out, then you stand a better chance of finding the right employee. Potentially, it’ll be someone that you never thought could be suitable.
Do you have any tips of your own? Share them below, and let us know how you’d improve the standard of job applicants.
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