Improve the conversion rates on your job descriptions with these 5 tips
In today’s competitive labour market, qualified candidates are in greater demand than ever. With plenty of options available to them, candidates can afford to be choosy — making it more and more difficult to attract and engage the best talent.
To improve your attraction efforts, it’s worth looking at your conversion rates across all of the touchpoints candidates encounter throughout your hiring process.
What is a conversion rate?
Put simply, your conversion rate is the number of actions taken, divided by the total number of actions that could have been taken.
When it comes to job descriptions, this would be the number of people who apply for the role, divided by the total number of views on a given job description.
Take a look at your average conversion rate across your job descriptions today, and then take a look at these tips and choose a few to implement. Then, sit back and watch your conversion rate increase over the coming months!
Why are job descriptions an especially important area to focus on?
We’re doing a deep dive on increasing your conversion rate for job descriptions specifically because they are such an important and early touchpoint in the candidate journey.
If your organization doesn’t have a well-known consumer or employer brand (yet!), candidates will often first find out about your organization through a job site, like Indeed, Glassdoor, or LinkedIn. They’ll read the job description and then decide whether your company is interesting enough to move forward with from there.
In other words, your job descriptions are often a candidate’s first impression of your brand. And if they aren’t done well, your prospective candidates will drop off before even applying.
So here are some tips to consider implementing to boost your top-of-funnel (pre-application) conversion rates:
1) Include a straightforward and SEO friendly job title
Before talking about conversion, let’s talk about how you can actually draw people into your funnel.
To increase your job’s visibility, it’s key to write a job title that your candidates are actually typing in and looking up. Search algorithms on platforms like Google, Indeed, or LinkedIn will prioritize your jobs if you choose job titles that are as close as possible to what people are actually searching.
You can use a tool like Google Keywords Planner to see which titles are most popular (you just need to create a free Google Ads account to use this tool). You can also ask your account managers at Indeed, LinkedIn, or Glassdoor for info, as they will likely have some stats on job title best practices to help you out.
Keep in mind it’s okay to go to market with one title even if the internal title is a little different. Just be clear with candidates about the internal job title during the screening process.
Avoid using words like “Ninja” or “Hero” in your title, as candidates aren’t searching for these terms (and frankly these types of “fun” job titles have had their time and are now viewed as cheesy rather than attractive).
It’s also important to think about the language candidates are searching in around the globe. For example, if you’re hiring for an English-speaking role, candidates in Germany are still likely to begin their job search in German — so your external job title should reflect that.
2) Keep things concise and engaging
Your job description should be engaging to read, and should complement the explanation of the role and requirements with the “what’s in it for me” for candidates.
That being said, it’s important to keep things to-the-point. Candidates are often in a hurry and don’t have the time or patience to read through long walls of text. Keep things short and snappy to up the chances that candidates will read through and hit apply.
To help keep your job descriptions concise, it’s also useful to remember that you don’t need to share every piece of information about your company in your job descriptions! You can infuse more information about your organization and culture across other touchpoints in the candidate journey, like your LinkedIn Life tab, careers site, etc. Candidates are going to look there at some point anyway if they’re interested, so there’s no need to overwhelm them with too much info in one spot.
3) Include more than just text - embed video and images if possible
Job descriptions that feature videos and images — also known as enhanced job descriptions — are used by best-in-class employers to communicate their culture and employee value proposition during this critical early stage in the process.
Enhanced job descriptions go beyond the typical list of skills and qualifications and turn your job descriptions into creative landing pages with visually appealing content that is designed to convert more candidates into applicants.
Here’s a couple of examples of what they look like in action:
Burnco’s job descriptions feature a beautiful high-resolution header of real employees doing the work they love.
Great Clips’ job descriptions feature a visual success profile, testimonials, and benefits iconography.
T-Mobile’s job descriptions feature visual benefits cards that show future employees all the perks they’ll enjoy as part of Team Magenta.
Why does this approach work? Content that features videos and images is proven to increase Google search rankings, the length of time visitors spend on your page, and conversions.
4) Share your differentiators
Candidates want to understand why they should pick your company over another employment option. You should make it clear to them up front how you differ from your competitors and why they should choose your role. To do so, you should include information about your employee value proposition and the employee experience that candidates can anticipate in your job description.
Take a look at the following resources to learn more about how you can define your unique company story to improve your job descriptions (and other touchpoints):
What is an employee value proposition? And why do you need one
How to uncover your organization’s employee value proposition (EVP): a 7-step process
How to conduct a hiring competitor scan and stand out from the crowd
5) Put together a copywriting workshop for your recruiters and hiring managers
The hard part about putting these tips into play is that for many organizations recruiters and HR managers are the ones who are expected to write job descriptions, rather than the communications or marketing team.
Recruiters and hiring managers are not copywriters by trade, so they may need a little extra training and support to produce the calibre of job descriptions that candidates expect.
To solve for this, we recommend putting together a copywriting workshop for your HR teams and hiring partners to teach candidate communication best practices that they can use for job descriptions, as well as for candidate reach outs and interviews.
Workshops should contain general tips like the ones on this list, as well as some more company-specific insights like how to communicate your specific employee value proposition to candidates.
If you’re short on time, our team at The Employer Brand Shop can create and even deliver a custom Copywriting for Candidate Conversion workshop for your hiring managers and recruiters! Or we can work with you to improve your job description strategy and template to improve conversion results over time.
And, of course, if you have capacity yourself, give these tips a go! If you choose a couple of these tips to administer consistently across the board, your organization is sure to make great strides towards improving your top-of-funnel conversion rate.
About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.