Want A-player candidates to apply to your role? Do this with the job description! (Hiring High Performers Part 6 of 6)
At the time of writing this article, the industry-leading jobs board Jobs4Football has 299 active roles! The top category is Coaching & Performance with 121 roles. How will you make sure the best coaching talent applies to your role vs. one of the other 120?
Following the guidelines below is a small investment to make for a big payoff in terms of speed and attracting diverse candidates. Did you know that:
women are less likely to apply to roles that use superlatives and gender-coded words e.g. confident, ambitious, dominant
Zillow Group was able to attract 10% more applicants who identify as women than average by using certain words in their job postings which more clearly highlighted their company culture.
Popular travel platform Expedia was able to fill their roles 8 days faster once they overhauled their job descriptions with gender-neutral language.
STEP 1: Attract diverse candidates by including benefits and expectations on the process
Advertise the specific benefits and policies available, make salaries non-negotiable and include them in job adverts.
Provide candidates with clear expectations, timelines, and communications (i.e. in the auto reply email sent when candidates submit their application).
STEP 2: Make the copy snazzy and concise - ensure your team’s flavor comes through!
It doesn't take much to write a non-generic statement. The most attractive job descriptions are the ones which look like they were written by someone intimately familiar with the role.
Some ideas to personalize your description:
Are there any strategic objectives you can mention in the job post to excite candidates?
Anything you can mention about your team’s culture so the right candidate could picture themselves joining you?
Are there any unique and specific challenges of this role which a candidate would not get to work on if they joined a different team? Definitely add those!
Go back to Part 2 and review your notes on “what we can offer the candidate in terms of career progression”. Add this info to the job description to make it stand out. You can even use AI tools like ChatGPT to get a base. Simply go there and type in “pretend I am a sports physiotherapist and persuade me to take a job at your company”. Take that input and customize it to your team. You’d be surprised how helpful of a starting point free tools can provide!
Here are some other guidelines from an analysis of over 350 million job descriptions to ensure the most appealing job description:
Try to keep to 600-700 words total
Simple sentences perform best (approximately 13 words per sentence)
Top performing job adverts have ⅓ of content listed as bullet points
The most successful job listings speak directly to the candidate by using the pronouns “you” and “we”, instead of indirect phrases like “the ideal candidate”
STEP 3: Review word choice one more time before posting
Once you’re done writing the job description, take 5 minutes to run it through a tool like Gender Decoder to easily find alternatives to any biased language you might not have realized in your text. There are also several premium tools offering inclusivity features extending past the job description (such as UInclude or Textio).
This is the last post in our series, Hiring High Performers. We hope this info was helpful. To read previous posts, check out the Resources section on our website!
You can also find an interactive G sheet template here which guides you through all the best practices in this series.
