Job Posting Struggles? 40 Tips to Streamline Your Job Posting Efforts

What’s the trouble with job posting?

Sometimes, life can only be understood through an 80’s cult classic. Remember Gremlins? All those fiendish little imps devolved from a single sweet and cuddly creature.

The role of HR is much like the movie…stay with me. An HR professional’s responsibilities once centered around advocating for employees in a corporate climate bent on profits. Luckily, many companies came around to the idea that their human capital is their most valuable asset. But with that realization, the HR department’s roles multiplied.

Take job posting, for example. From navigating legions of job sites to promoting your employer brand, even posting entry-level job ads can be a pain in the neck. We’ve got you covered with the following 40 tips to streamline your job posting efforts.

How to Write an Optimized Job Posting

Your job posting has to accomplish quite a bit. It needs to be clear, yet appealing. Optimized for search engines, yet written for humans. Your job description must also communicate your culture and employer brand. As powerful tools for your diversity goals, job postings must reflect your company’s awareness of marginalized groups and inclusion efforts.

Preparation Is Key to Writing a Job Ad

Before you set pen to paper, use these following tips:

1. Meet with team leaders to update the job description.
2. Identify the core characteristics of your ideal applicant. Note, focus on values rather than experience or educational requirements, e.g., independent worker or team player, etc.
3. Now identify the minimum experience and educational requirements for the role. Puffing up your requirements just to avoid sifting through too many applications often has the unintended effect of discouraging marginalized groups from applying. Below, we have tips to help candidates self-qualify to prevent an influx of junk resumes.

How to Write a Job Ad to Attract the Best Candidates

4. Write a job description that appeals to the qualities you identified in your ideal candidate in step 2. Check out this job ad from Taco Bell that appeals to their ideal employee, while also encouraging others to just keep scrolling.
5. Include the salary range. The transparency reflects well on your employer brand. You’ll help candidates self-qualify. And including salary ranges helps fight the wage gap for women and minorities.
6. Purge these terms from your vocabulary: superstar, rock star, anything ninja. These terms are dated and really do nothing to help you connect with the right candidate.
7. Highlight the benefits of working at your company, from actual benefits to work environment.
8. Use gender-neutral words.

How to Write a Job Posting Optimized for the Search Engines

9. Use a clear job title. Don’t create a job title that reads “Receptionist/Administrative Assistant.” Doing so confuses the Google job search engine. Instead use one and sprinkle the other one in the job description.
10. Search for the job title on the top job sites, such as a Glassdoor job posting. Count how many times the keyword is used in the job description for the top results, not counting the sponsored ads that appear first. Aim to use the keyword at least that many times.
11. Include the location in both the location field and within the job description.
12. Pro tip: ExactHire ATS optimizes job postings for you in many way.

Tips for Posting to a Job Board

With countless niche job boards, paid job boards and options for sponsored job postings, keeping it all organized can be a chore. These tips will help tame the digital clutter.

13. Create a secured document or spreadsheet with links to job sites and your company’s login. You’ll have a quick reference for yourself and also a means to delegate the posting of some jobs.
14. Group your list of the job sites you use with all open positions at the top. Then create separate groups according to job type, such as paid sites for management positions or niche sites for welding positions.

Creative Job Ad Examples

If you’re still itching to post a job ad for a superstar, we have some tips to help you get creative using the best job posting examples.

15. Focus on how the role improves the world, even in a seemingly small role. For an online job board example, everyone has experienced a rude or incompetent customer service representative. Turn that experience into a job ad in which the candidate can “be the change he or she wants to see in the world” by speaking to that universal experience.
16. Take a picture of your team having fun. Then post it and your job ad to your social channel–consider looking at your competitors for other social job posting examples.
17. Create a humorous compilation of the non-awesome qualities you typically see, and write a job ad that calls out the slackers. Just one of the many job board examples using this technique, a job ad for a server read, “Please do not apply if you need nights off because your band has a gig.”
18. You can flip the humor around and write creative job ad examples that are really, really honest about why your place of work is awesome. Another server ad read, “looking for someone well-versed in the subtle art of sarcasm.”
19. Create a video on your branded careers page, but don’t be generic to avoid being the butt of the joke in this recruitment video by Fiverr.

Job Board Posting Software

Don’t have a branded careers site? Oh… yikes. That’s too bad because a branded careers site can do some heavy lifting in your recruiting efforts. It can be the place all the job sites send your candidates, where they can fill out an application or view other open positions at your company. Your branded careers sites can also showcase your company’s culture and highlight your employer brand.

A branded careers site is just one advantage of using applicant tracking software (ATS). An ATS is job board posting software that can help you streamline your job posting efforts and help in other ways too, like:

20. Post to multiple job boards and social media with just one click. An ATS will remember all your favorite job sites and their passwords.
21. Access a dashboard that analyzes job ad performance across sites on a single screen. Stop wasting time and money on job sites that don’t perform for your company.
22. Receive recommendations, tailored to your company, for sponsored job posting and programmatic job advertising. Take the expensive guesswork out of paying for job ads.
23. Increase candidate conversion with mobile everything. Text messaging, QR codes, or even applying with a phone number, going mobile will streamline your recruiting efforts.
24. Organize your job candidates. An ATS will sort applicants and push the best to the top of the list.
25. Master compliance reporting. An ATS will also track all the applicant details and create reports to help you stay compliant.
26. Use an online employment application linked from your branded careers site (hey, it’s worth repeating).

Tips for Top Job Posting Sites

Most applicants go to top job posting sites Indeed, LinkedIn or Google for Jobs. These tips will help you reach them.

27. Claim your company page on Indeed, perhaps the best job posting site for employers. This is where former employees and interviewees can leave reviews for your company.
28. Take advantage of LinkedIn’s premium membership to scout out the best passive candidates and send them an Inmail.
29. Stagger your job postings across sites to remain on page one of Google for Jobs Search. Google’s job post schema is a search engine that pulls together listings across job sites.
30. Make sure your company’s LinkedIn page is updated.
31. Make sure the personal profile of whomever is named as the contact in your job ad is updated in LinkedIn.
32. Join LinkedIn groups where your ideal candidates are.

Tips to Find Free Job Posting Sites

Recruiting isn’t cheap. SHRM estimates it takes six to nine months of a position’s salary to recruit and onboard a new hire. Save some money using these tips for finding free job posting sites.

33. Start with LinkedIn and Indeed, both are top job search sites and have options to post jobs for free.
34. Edit the HTML of your job posting on your website to integrate with Google for Jobs API. Hint: Your ATS provider will do this for you.
35. Handshake is a free platform to help employers connect with college students at hundreds of schools.
36. If you’re one of the thousands of companies going remote, check out Hubstaff Talent, a free job board for remote job listings.
37. Check out local institutions and niche job boards. Universities, high schools, and state employment sites often offer options to post a job for free online.
38. Post jobs for free on Craigslist.
39. Use Monster for free job posting.

Final Tip

Posting job ads can be a bit chaotic. And if you don’t do it right, you risk keeping that chair empty longer than necessary. These tips will help you tame the chaos and organize your job posting efforts. We have one tip that cut the work in half. You ready?

40. Use an ATS.

Really. It’s the best way to organize and track your job posting efforts. When you use an ATS, you do more than tame the job posting gremlin. You elevate your efforts by harnessing the data that will shorten the time it takes to fill your empty positions.

Ready to learn more? Sign up for a demo of ExactHire today.

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash