Filling your talent pipeline with high-quality candidates isn’t easy – especially in such a crowded job market. In fact, research finds that it takes Australian companies an average of 68 days and $5,000 to fill a vacant position.
But there are ways to make your company stand out from the crowd. One way is by crafting a top-notch job description. In this post, we’ll explain how to write a job description that attracts great candidates to your company.
How to write a job description that attracts high-quality applicants
While it’s easy to slap together a job description and blast it across multiple job sites, attracting high-quality applicants requires a more thoughtful approach. Here are five of our best recommendations when it comes to writing a quality job description.
1. Conduct a job analysis
A job analysis is a process of collecting information about the specific role you’re hiring for. The purpose of conducting a job analysis is to ensure you’re representing the skills, knowledge, and background needed for the role as accurately as possible for applicants. While there are many ways to gather this data, here are a few ways to start:
- Look at the job descriptions of competitors hiring for similar roles
- Interview or observe employees who are in the same or similar role at your organisation
- Review sites like Glassdoor to get a sense of the required skills, responsibilities, and salary of the role
2. Collect input from other employees
Another way to ensure your job description is as thorough as possible is to consult the employees within your own organisation. If you’re hiring for a Marketing Coordinator, for example, you may want to speak with other members on the marketing team – especially the manager that will be overseeing the new hire.
If you want to take this strategy a step further, have conversations with people from other teams who are likely to work closely with the new hire. So if your Marketing Coordinator is going to work alongside your sales team, interview a few of your Account Executives to understand their expectations and perspectives.
After you put the initial draft of the job description together, you may want to have these same people review it to ensure you’ve captured all their feedback accurately.
3. Provide all the key information up-front
Now that you have all this information collected, how do you write the official job description? The most important thing to keep in mind is that it’s better to share more details, rather than less. To help you format and prioritise all of your information, below are the basic sections you should include in the job description:
- A description of the job and job title
- A summary of the location, role responsibilities, and preferred qualifications
- An overview of the company culture and benefits
- The expected salary range
- The company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement
- Any additional information about potential travel requirements, work hours, etc.
The more information you provide up-front, the more likely it is that the applicant will be a good match for your organisation. When you don’t share key information, such as the salary range, you may end up wasting everyone’s time when it turns out that the compensation doesn’t align with the applicant’s expectations.
4. Review the job description for biases
Before hitting ‘publish’ on your job description, have a third party review your job description for any biases or non-inclusive language. It’s easy to let minor mistakes slip through without realising or intending to, which is why it’s helpful to have fresh eyes on your work!
Whoever reviews your job description should look for things like non-gender neutral pronouns or gender-coded words, internal jargon that might alienate applicants, or any other signs of implicit bias.
5. Identify the right channels to post your job description
Finally, you want to make sure you’re publishing your job description on high-quality job sites. While it might seem like the best strategy is to spam as many of them as possible, this will only end up wasting your valuable time and money.
Instead, we encourage HR teams to take a more targeted approach and select job sites that are known for attracting high-quality candidates. Below are a few of the websites, which are a mix of local and global, that we recommend starting with:
A thoughtful and well-written job description is the first step to bringing more high-quality candidates into your talent pipeline. Use our recommendations to get started on the right foot. Flare HR also provides free onboarding software that can help you onboard new employees and give them the best first days and the best onboarding experience. To learn more, please request a demo.
