Thursday, February 12, 2015

One Simple Way to Attract More/Better Job Applicants

The Wall Street Journal reported this week on an interesting new study about recruiting top candidates for a job opening.   David Jones, Joseph Schmidt, and Derek Chapman have conducted  a study that focuses on how employers write job ads.  They compared ads that emphasized the skills and abilities required by the organization for the position (employer-centered) vs. ads that focused on what opportunities the organization can provide for the prospective employee (candidate-centered).     They worked with an engineering-consulting firm to test the impact of these two different types of job postings.  What did they find?   The "candidate centered" postings attracted more candidates than the "employer-centered" ads.  Moreover, the applicants to the "candidate-centered" postings tended to be of higher quality.   In sum, the best applicants want to know: "What's in it for me?  What can you do for me?"  If you don't begin to answer that question in the job ad itself, you won't get as many qualified applicants. 

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