Modern-day job postings have become less about recruiting and more about marketing. Due to such a competitive labor market, organizations need to view their job postings as a valuable opportunity to strategically advertise. Ultimately, how are your HR, recruiting, and talent acquisition teams going to sell prospective candidates on their open job?

Here are five tips to sell your open position to potential applicants and uniquely tailor your job posting to the greater candidate market.

7 Tips for Writing a Strong Job Posting

Choose a keyword-focused job title

The first step in writing your job posting is arguably the most important. Selecting the right job title is critical to connecting with a wider candidate pool. Perform some keyword research on job boards like Indeed or ZipRecruiter to see the types of jobs that are commonly searched by candidates, as most will only click on the first three or four options they see. Choosing a title that is succinct and directly targets job seekers with the background and experience you’re looking for will optimize the success of your search. But by selecting a title that’s unconventional, you run the risk of not generating significant interest from candidates exploring the labor market.

Create an opening “hook”

The goal of any job posting should be to immediately entice the prospective candidate within the first few sentences of its opening paragraph. Generating excitement about the opportunity can help motivate and encourage the job seeker to apply for the role. Companies need to ask themselves: how can we describe this position to grasp people’s attention? Whether you’re selling candidates on the opportunity to operate in a competitive work environment, make a difference in the local community by offering a unique product or service, or join a hardworking team of subject matter experts, be sure that the first few lines of your job posting talk about the most intriguing parts of the job.

Establish your company’s brand

Formulating a well-written job posting presents an exceptional opportunity for companies to not only advertise their open positions, but promote their employer brand in the candidate market. After examining your organization’s value proposition and coming up with a list of key differentiators that separates you from your competition, weave these pieces of information into the job posting. For a candidate that may not have been exposed to your company in the past, this is a critical opportunity to introduce your brand and broaden their knowledge of who you are and what you do.

Discuss perks and incentives

Beyond learning about the available job opportunity and your company, prospective candidates will be interested in discovering more about your benefits packages, workplace perks, and additional incentives. What do you offer to your employees that could coax them to join your team? If your company is offering 401(k) matches, tuition reimbursement programs, childcare stipends, quarterly bonuses, or other cool benefits, be sure to include them in your job posting. In this tight labor market, the strength and viability of your benefits package could be the difference between hiring a candidate and losing them to a competitor.

Be concise and to-the-point

No candidates want to read a long-drawn-out job posting with information that won’t be relevant to their role or responsibilities. My advice to you? Keep these job postings simple! Be succinct in your advertising and deliver information that’s pertinent to the potential applicant. Don’t overload your job posting with too many duties associated with the position, as this could often intimate—and eliminate—prospective job seekers. Hiring managers can fully educate each candidate on their specific responsibilities tied to the role later on in the recruiting process.

Summary

In such a tight talent market, companies are faced with a razor-thin margin of error when trying to attract candidates to join their teams. By constructing well-thought-out job postings and tailoring them to the wants and needs of prospective job seekers, organizations will undoubtedly see higher numbers of applicants and greater improvements in their overall talent acquisition strategy.

Looking for a job posting template that’s proven to attract high-quality candidates to your open position? Check out Acara’s latest infographic to learn how you can properly structure your job postings.

Want to know the secret to securing top talent? Learn this simple trick to improve your candidate attraction efforts.