First impressions matter.

For many jobseekers, viewing your organization’s job posting will be the first in-depth interaction that they will have with your company. In that moment, your posting must not only highlight the job, perks and individual rewards, but also serve as a highly compelling employer brand platform. It must convey your employee value proposition, offer up evidence of your company’s workplace culture, highlight the leadership, and belonging that the reader is looking for.

Given the stakes implicit in that first interaction, it’s worth devoting significant attention to this touchpoint. Unfortunately, job postings are often left out of Employer Brand research and activation campaigns and read as little more than lists of the skills and experience an employer is hoping will match up to an ideal candidate.

To help offer clarity on job posting best practices in employer branding, we’ve gathered some of our employer brand professionals’ top recommendations here.

Speak From a Place of Service

The most effective way to communicate your employee value proposition to job seekers is to approach the recruitment process with the candidate’s wants and needs squarely at the center. To accomplish this, develop in-depth candidate personas and detailed candidate journey maps.

When written from this candidate-centric perspective, you will discover that job postings communicate with a much greater focus on what the role is, the purpose and impact behind it, and how working at your company will benefit your target audience. By speaking to the values and culture of your organization with authenticity, and aligning it to what your audience is seeking, you will find that you attract applicants who are a better match, and more likely to become productive, successful hires.

Tell the True Story of the Role

Done right, a job posting can give prospective candidates a true glimpse into a day in the life of a role.

Whoever is currently in the position should be able to read the description and feel like it perfectly captures their experience. Ideally, at least one employee currently in the role should be invited in the job posting copy review process to ensure it captures what makes the job exciting and rewarding.

If possible, these employees can then be engaged as brand advocates and asked to share the written and video job ads with their networks. These stories can in turn be repurposed on social content feeds and careers sites to further promote your open positions.

Segment Your Messaging to Connect Better with Your Target Audience

The desires and pain points of tech candidates are very different from those of jobseekers in finance. In today’s highly competitive marketplace, it is essential to create segmented employee value propositions that are aligned to the unique needs and aspirations of your core talent audiences. We find that many of these core talent audiences have unique attributes that they are seeking from potential employers, based on their stage in life, or career interests When candidates read your job posting, they are reading to determine whether your company can meet the needs that their current employer is unable to live up to. In our current economy where there are millions more job openings than available talent, a job posting must be written in a manner that quickly convinces your audience that you are their ideal place to work.

Engage in Co-Creation and Build a Branded Job Posting Anatomy

In the vast majority of organizations, no one person knows everything necessary to create an impactful job posting. We’ve found that the most effective postings are a joint effort between HR, communications, marketing, and the position’s hiring manager.

When partnering with an employer brand agency, you can expect that the insights gathered from talent persona development, segmented and EDI messaging, employee value proposition development and SEO analysis provide the foundations required to rebrand highly compelling templates.

Should you go it on your own, we recommend collaborating with several key constituents. The Talent Acquisition leader will provide insight into what prospective candidates are looking for and how best to speak to their hopes and concerns. While working with your HR partners, ensure that your DEIB leadership has a voice and shares inclusive language and messaging to enable your posting to connect with a richer and more diverse talent pool.

Your marketing and social media expert is best to help with SEO optimization for the posting and provide creative ways to get the posting seen, perhaps even incorporating social campaigns and less common formats such as video.

The hiring manager can speak to the skill set needed, what success will look like, and what the ideal candidate can expect to get out of the role from a personal development and impact perspective. Often, it’s a good idea to invite someone who does the job in question (or a similar one) into the discussion as well.

Once you have gathered the unique perspectives of all these constituents, your communications partner will be able to incorporate and build far more compelling and results focused job postings to help you win talent in today’s crowded labor marketplace.

What you will find when you go through this exercise for several jobs, is that an anatomy of the perfect posting begins to emerge. This will allow for more templating that includes locked and consistent employer branded messaging and highlights the sections that can and should be editable for each new posting to get the best results.

Blu Ivy often includes this work from the outset of our projects and employer brand research. In turn, the above best practices are followed, and our clients receive a kit of templated Rebranded and Optimized job postings that are ready to use at the launch.

Blog Author

Thomas Reneau
Director Employer Brand and Culture
Western Canada

About Us

Blu Ivy Group is a global leader in employer branding, organizational culture, and recruitment marketing. We help organizations across the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors build extraordinary employee experiences, magnetic employer brands, and high-performance cultures.

From C-Suite to Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition leadership, we partner with our clients to transform their organizations and design the most compelling workplaces of the future.

For inquiries, please contact sparker@bluivygroup.com.