How to Improve the Quality of Internet-Based Applicants

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How to Improve the Quality of Internet Based Applicants

By Sam Morse

I'd like to tell you some secrets on how employers and recruiting companies find exactly the talent they want using the Internet. Most of these secrets are pretty generic and can be applied to many career sites. Some of them are specific to MINNESOTAJOBS.COM.

Job Posting Timing
What is the best day of the week to post jobs? Job seekers are most active Tuesday - Thursday. So, don't expect a lot of great resumes waiting for you Monday morning if you post on Friday. Mondays are great times to post jobs.

Busiest times of the year: January - March, September - October. That's New Year resolution time and summer vacation ending time.

Job propagation: If your posting is going to a network or the career site you are working with uses job aggregators such as Indeed, SimplyHired, etc. expect up to 3 days until your original job posting reaches those sites. Typically, they scrape jobs from their source sites once a day and it can take a day or two before they appear in the aggregators' databases.

Job life cycle: A job posted on a site will be seen most in the first week - after that views and replies decrease. Many sites give you the option to "refresh" the job date. This effort typically puts the job on the top of lists on the specific site but will not facilitate scraping from partners in their network or aggregators. If you really want to boost your responses, delete the job and post another one. I'd recommend using different copy and maybe a different title. It's a lot of work but if you are having problems finding candidates, this will help significantly. If you do this, I'd recommend waiting minimally a week after the initial post.

Job Posting Text

Title
The title is probably the most important aspect of Internet job postings. I can't emphasize this enough. There are several important pieces to consider.

Use a generic job title. As an example use "Customer Service Representative" or even just "Customer Service" vs "Stakeholder Fulfillment Coordinator" or some other non-standard title. Obviously there is value to fancy titles. Leave them for the job posting body. When people search for jobs, they will not search for "Stakeholder Fulfillment Coordinator", they will search for "Customer Service", maybe "Customer Service Representative" or "Customer Service Job."
Include city and maybe state in the job title. In some cases it may be redundant but it will help differentiate your job on some partner sites. As an example, if your job is tweeted, it will be a good filter for twitter users.
Use attention grabbing words such as "Once in a lifetime Customer Service Opportunity" or "Super Electrical Engineering job for a Super Electrical Engineer."
USE ALL CAPITALS IF POSSIBLE.

The title is your micro-marketing opportunity. Put some thought into it.

Body

Copying and pasting your employee manual job descriptions may be fast and convenient but it will turn away a lot of great people that are a very close match to what you are looking for. For instance, I bet a super qualified marketing manager that might not be comfortable with the "Must be able to lift 50 pounds" line could be an asset for your company.

I could go on for several pages on what constitutes good copy for job postings. Chopping off 90% of what you have developed as a standardized job description is a great start. Seeking outside help with writing the copy will result in a much better candidate pool.

Here are some basic tips:

Don't use just one sentence unless you are really just trying to harvest resumes.
Brag about the company in the body of the job description.
Avoid absolutes in describing qualifications. You might just find an "almost qualified" candidate that is a better fit for your company than a "fully qualified" candidate.
Use abbreviations AND use full descriptions. Many searches for jobs are done using the abbreviations and many searches use the full description. Remember, it is pretty common for someone to search for jobs for friends and family. They may not be familiar with the abbreviations. Also, try to avoid abbreviations that are common internally to your company but may not be common throughout the field. Check with your hiring managers if you are not sure.
Using HTML is a risky deal. Aggregators may not handle it well. Also each site has its own ways of dealing with HTML from non-existent to full support. It is better to just clearly lay out a plain text document. It will save you time and ensure your job appears consistently throughout the career Web site's partnership networks.
Brag about the job.
Only post one job per slot. Our experience shows that response rates go down quite a bit if you list several jobs in a job slot.
As mentioned above, there are many other techniques on how to write the best body of a job posting. The key thing is to remember that you are marketing the job to a very targeted audience. Try to think like them.

Other Fields

Some forms are very simple, some are very complex. For the most part, people are either scanning job titles or searching for keywords in the body of the job posting. The vast majority of job seekers are interested in the title, location and companies. Salary information is handy but usually can be included in the body of the posting.

Hot Jobs

Flagging a job so that it stands out or appears on the top of a list only makes sense if the job is competing with multiple pages of similar jobs in the same location.

Web Address

Job seekers are taught that learning about a company is important. Include the home page of your Web site in the body and/or the job posting field entry specified for it. Both is best.

Questions

Some sites, including ours, support asking questions of the job seeker. If you are not directing job seekers to your corporate applicant section, this is a good thing to do. Simply asking "Are you absolutely sure you are qualified for this job" will virtually eliminate unqualified applicants.

Connection to Your Application System

Many pages could be devoted to this topic as well. I'll just tell you what the most important thing is. I would recommend coordinating with your IT people so that when someone clicks on a link the applicant is taken to a page that has a button that says "Apply Now" or something similar. Directing job seekers to your corporate home page or the "search for a job on our site" page may discourage highly qualified job seekers. If there are similar jobs on the career Web site they just left, they may just check out other jobs first.

Tracking from the Career Web site to Your Applicant System

The "How did you hear about us" pull down menus or fields are highly inaccurate and worthless. Let me know if you are interested in a good report published by a 3rd party discussing the inaccuracies and I'd be happy to forward it to you.

There are several simple methods to track how many times your job is viewed and replied to independent of the reports the career site provides you. The simplest way to track how many people are going to your application tracking system is to tack on something like: ?site=job_site_name at the end of the application system URL. Your IT department can quickly view your Web server log and identify the site that actually hosts your job. A way to find out how many times a job is viewed is to imbed an invisibly image in the job posting. As an example, you could add:
< img src=http://yoursite.com/1pixelimage.gif> in the body or in one of the fields. Again, you will need your IT people to go through your server log to create a report. This should be a pretty trivial thing for them.

How to effectively use MINNESOTAJOBS.COM and DiversityMinnesota.com

We have many features you can use to improve the quality and quantity of the employment candidates we bring your way. Some of these features may be on other career sites as well.

First and Foremost - Customer Service

Are you not getting the quantity or quality of candidates you expected from us? We have a lot of tricks and techniques we can use to help you out. We want you to call us if you are having problems. Sometimes the solution is pretty simple. Sometimes we have to do a bit of legwork. We are here to provide that support. If there are issues between us, a third party or other people within your organization, we would love to coordinate problem solving. We do this every day and have been doing it since 1995 so we have a good grasp on how to make your MINNESOTAJOBS.COM experience as productive as possible.

Your Time is Limited

We can do all the work of managing jobs on our site. We work with many companies in this capacity. You have enough to do - we would love to take Internet recruiting off your list of things to do.

Help with Job Descriptions

Need help with a job description for a job you have on our sites or plan on having on our site, email your job posting to support@minnesotajobs.com or point us to the listing. We'll work our magic on it.

Tweeting

You can tweet your jobs posted on MINNESOTAJOBS.COM any time. Just log into your account and click on the tweet button next to your job in the list.

Also, let us know if you want us to retweet jobs and put them in the LinkedIn groups. We can also plug your company.

Profile

Take the time to put together a good profile. If you need help, we can put one together for you based on your Web site and its job section.

Graphic

Need help getting a company logo on our site? We'll do it for you.

Notes on the Other Fields our Job Form Provides

Try to select as many categories and subcategories your job fits into. Don't select job categories and subcategories that are unrelated to the specific posting. It is counterproductive on many levels.
There is no need to fill out the skills box in most cases. Include them in the body of the job description.
Entering a salary is optional. Most companies don't enter a value here and very few job seekers search by this criterion.
The same goes with experience, degree required and benefits. We recommend including that information in the job description body.
We recommend changing the contact name to "Human Resource." Most employers hide their email address and phone number. Most recruiters leave that information available.
Ideally your job link takes job seekers to the "Apply Now" page.
Always choose a Preferred Contact Method.
Entering contact instructions is a good idea. Here is another place to ask "Are you fully qualified for this job?"

Conclusion

This article highlight some of the basic ways to be more successful with job postings on career Web sites and also talks about how to be more effective using our site. There are many other tips and techniques. Hopefully, I will have the chance to discuss them in the future.

A final note worth emphasizing: We are a hands-on company that is directly involved with helping job seekers and employers/recruiters connect. We want you to call is or email us if you have questions or need help. Our phone number is 763-784-9393, 1-800-632-1576 and our email address is support@MINNESOTAJOBS.COM.