Recruitment Marketing for the Little Guy: 3 Ways to Sell The Position

Who are you as a business? Why should the next talented person care about what you offer? What makes them want to join your company?

More and more, these kinds of questions are at the center of a candidate’s decision to apply for your job opportunity. Of course, in an ideal world, jobseekers would already be familiar with our companies and why they’re great before they start their job search. But as a small business, the world is rarely ideal, and the fact is that for many candidates, your job posting will be the first time they’ve ever interacted with your firm.

So, alongside outlining the details of an open position, it’s critical that you use your job postings to advertise your identity and sell jobseekers on why your company is a great organization.

So how do you express your business identity in a job posting? Here are three tips to help ensure your job posting expresses your culture accurately.

3. It’s an Advertisement, Not an Essay

What do you think of when you think of great ads? Does Coca-Cola sell Coke by printing the ingredients list on a billboard? Of course not, they sell Coke because animated polar bears, celebrities, and people that look like you say it is pleasant and refreshing, drawing you in by selling an experience not a product. Applying this thinking to your job postings will immediately put you at the head of the pack. Rather than merely detailing duties and responsibilities, use your job posting to communicate an experience. Tell a story that addresses the popular jobseeker question, “Am I going to be happy walking into this office every day?”

2. Put Yourself In Their Shoes

When you’re writing the posting, you need to be very familiar with the role and, more importantly, what’s in it for candidates. It’s critical to understand what the day-to-day will be like and who the person will report to, but it’s equally valuable to understand the role’s importance to the growth of the company and how the candidate can learn and benefit from the role. In essence, you need market the strength of the opportunity as well as the basics. According to a CareerBuilder Study, the top 10 criteria that drive candidates to apply are:

Furthermore, a recent study found that job postings that addressed candidate needs led to a 14 percent higher response rate than those postings that were written to talk to employer needs.

1. Show the Work Environment

Rich media, like images and video, makes an impression faster. Unless your company is highly specialized, chances are the day-to-day responsibilities of the position will be similar to what they would be at other companies… so show your candidates instead of telling what it is like to actually work. Include video about you company and pictures of real employees at work. This will bring tangibility to your job posting.

As you implement these tips, look for numerical improvements in applicants, like in the number of interviews and hires made in relation to the number of job postings. And if you need more help writing the kind of job postings that equal more and better applicants, download our free eBook, “Developing a Winning Job Description.”