Why Do Candidates Ignore Your Job Ad?

The effectiveness of referral programs in recruitment depends on many different elements, and this topic will undoubtedly come up often on our blog. First, we want to take a closer look at the form and content of the job offer as a success factor not only for a referral program but for every recruitment.

The presentation of a job offer determines, on the one hand, whether people are motivated to recommend it, e.g. company employees or members of a community like ShareHire.pl; on the other hand, it should encourage the candidate – who came across the ad directly or through a referral – to hit the "Apply" button and complete the application process to our company.

Polish and foreign job boards alike are filled with thousands of offers that look alike, full of rounded statements, polished in the style of corporate PR copy. I often ponder the thread of plagiarism in job ads. After all, there is nothing simpler (many have already figured this out) than copying a competitor's ad in its essentials, giving it "uniqueness" with one or two phrases indicating that it is us, and not the competition, who authored the text. I am not a specialist in copyright protection (perhaps one of you, dear readers, is, so I would be grateful for an appropriate comment), but perhaps the author of the words "we offer work in a young, dynamic team" and a few other similar ones could live comfortably off the royalties.

Browsing job ads, one gets the impression that the vast majority of companies reduce their form and content to an advertising leaflet printed in thousands of copies and available in the same spot on the shelf in every branch of the company across the country. While in advertising leaflets I am not particularly bothered by standardization and short, general texts garnished with a smiling lady you can rest your eye on for a moment while flipping the page, a similar marketing technology applied to a job ad triggers my resistance. Active resistance, I should add, of which this article is meant to be proof. Why? I will devote the rest of this text to answering that question.

To begin, I will refer to research – that always makes a good impression, especially when it is conducted by someone recognizable in the industry, so I will use the results of the second edition of the Candidate Experience survey organized by eRecruiter. Analyzing the answers to the question "What in a job offer discourages you from applying?", apart from the missing company name (the highest percentage of responses), respondents most often point to issues such as: a lack of clarity about the position, and terse information about what the company offers employees. Moreover, in 6th and 7th place, with around 30% of responses, were the answers: "no contact details for the company" and "no salary given".

Conclusion: 5 of the 7 most frequently indicated answers concern the way the offer is worded.

So, without digging deeper into the topic, we can state that every job offer should have its own unique and specific description, just as every position (understood as a job description) is unique in the organization – at least that's how it should be. Companies, even in the same industry, differ in structure, culture and goals, which translates into the scope of tasks and requirements, and this should be superbly reflected precisely in the job offer. "Stand out or die" is still a living slogan in business, and it should equally be one of the guiding principles of employer branding activities at the level of job offer communication.

To the eRecruiter research I can add our own statistics, which also clearly show that an interesting and unconventionally worded job offer produces the desired effect. ShareHire.pl's record holder in terms of views and social media shares is the offer of the not-necessarily-widely-known company Mosqi.to, which, thanks to its original form (the lead graphic was a photo of an employee holding a sign saying "looking for a head of creative") and content (a quote from the requirements: "It would be good if he were smarter and funnier than us"), generated unparalleled interest among candidates.

Returning to the main thread, remember that in the case of referral programs, the form and content of the offer are doubly important for recruitment effectiveness. Compose the offer so that the referrer feels they are sharing information about an attractive job at an interesting company, and the candidate knows enough about the proposal to make their decision to apply easier. When creating a job offer, even not necessarily with a referral program in mind, remember that it is a very important employer branding tool which, released into the whirl of a referral system and social media, can reach further than we expect. A case in point are the best offers published on ShareHire.pl, which, with no marketing spend, reach over 1,000 views in the target group purely through the power of the online community.

Thinking about making the labor market more attractive, so that job offers compete online with the most popular memes and YouTube videos, I will share a few tips – observations drawn from our practice, but also from the wisdom of the ShareHire.pl community gathered, among other places, in a closed Facebook group:

Give recruitment a human dimension. Show the company's employees, introduce the person running the recruitment, provide a way to get in touch, even via a link to a social media profile. Everyone googles information about everyone anyway, so don't make access to information about yourself difficult, because that increasingly resembles tilting at windmills.
Show the real work and the people in the company. These days you can take good-quality photos with a phone, and the services of a graphic designer who could make the message more attractive won't ruin the company's budget either, so we encourage you to crack open the company's door already at the offer stage, beyond the watchful eye of the doorman or the access control system. The same goes for videos. Here we encourage the use of video materials, both the "official" corporate ones and spontaneous ones, shot by the employees themselves, showing them, the boss, the workplace, etc. It will certainly have a positive impact on interest in the job offer, make referring easier and set the company on the road to social media success.
Don't be afraid of specifics. Write clearly about the goals of the position, use specific industry terms, point to concrete tasks broken down by importance according to time spent or priorities in the given role. Give the candidate the feeling that on the other side there is a professional in the industry just like them, and not "the psychologist lady" – as recruitment specialists are often colloquially perceived. I also encourage you to write appetizingly and describe exhaustively what we want to offer the employee in return for their work. Point out specific benefits, the form of employment and the salary. This last issue raises a lot of controversy, but in my opinion it significantly makes decisions easier for candidates while also reducing how time-consuming the process is for recruiters. After all, the point is not to have 30 applications; what matters is having even that one, but the right one. As an HR professional with corporate experience, I realize that communicating even a salary range in an offer often has many organizational implications; nevertheless, we encourage openness on this issue – your employees talk to each other about their salaries in the smoking room anyway.
Write something interesting about the company. Avoid general PR "bits", don't write about dynamic growth, market expansion, etc. Focus on describing what may be important for a candidate for the given position or what may simply interest them on a human level. Look at the company through the eyes of an employee, not the CEO, a client or an investor – leave that perspective to the PR department.
Keep it symmetrical. Don't expect too much while offering little. The worst-looking job offer is one where the requirements don't fit on one screen, while the description of tasks or employment conditions is squeezed into 4 lines in the margin. Beyond the quantitative aspect, let's remember to keep requirements rational relative to the tasks and conditions. I invite you to read the comments in Facebook groups under offers where a litany of expectations is juxtaposed with a terse presentation of other information or an inadequately modest salary offer. It's hard to build the image of an attractive employer that way.

I encourage you to expand the above list in the comments under the article. There are, after all, examples of interesting, well-composed offers. Feel free to share your experiences and opinions. May this article be at least a small inspiration to breathe life into the way job offers are presented. I know there's not enough time for it between meetings with candidates – it's just that one day it may turn out that there are fewer and fewer of those meetings, because candidates will be applying to your competitors' more attractive offers.

Sources and inspirations:

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Why Do Candidates Ignore Your Job Ad?

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