tips for Effective Job Descriptions

Tips for Crafting Highly Effective Job Descriptions

Tips for Crafting Highly Effective Job Descriptions

Hiring the right-fit candidate that can suit your business’s work culture and improve your working efficiency isn’t an easy task to do. Hiring suitable candidates largely depend on your ability to engage and attract star talent. An effective, appealing, and inclusive job description would help you pipeline top talent in the market for interviews. With a clean and connecting flow of information in your JD, you can improve the applicant’s conversion rate and bring a wide range of talented candidates into your recruitment pipeline. When it comes to engaging candidates via a video interview platform, a well-structured job description is inevitable to ensure you’re not turning off talented candidates before they apply.

An effective job description should combine the flow of information that can strike the applicant’s expectations and explains the roles and responsibilities in detail. Your job description should reflect the marketing sense, factual presentation, skills demand, and the organization’s culture correctly if you’re trying to engage rational candidates’. Emphasis on an organization’s culture, mission, and values could ensure you that you’re attracting candidates who are comfortable with your company’s HR policies and work ethics. Besides, it will also increase employee’s retention rates and reduce expenses on hiring activities.

In this post, we will discuss tips that are essential for crafting a highly effective job description.

1. Choose a compelling job title

If you’re facing trouble filling your job position with the desired talent, it is an indication that you are turning off candidates before they apply. This may happen because you haven’t given a suitable job title to your job opening, and applicants aren’t receiving a clean and clear message from your job title. An Indeed survey reveals that most applicants search for roles based on their skills and experience. Keeping this fact in mind, don’t forget to insert keywords in the job title that directly explains your skills demand. For instance, ‘NEED MARKETING MANAGER WITH 5 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE.

Creativity can help you stand out when writing your job title but don’t try to be so unique that you miss candidates looking for the same job under a different keyword. Integration of industry-standard language could shine your job title and excite dynamic candidates to apply for the position.

2. Craft a short, engaging overview of the job

The first paragraph of your job description should address significant concerns like how this role contributes to achieving the company’s objectives and why it’s essential not just to the company but to society in a broader sense. These 4-5 lines at the beginning of your job description could also act as a scanner. It quickly provides an understanding of roles and responsibilities to the candidates and turns off odd-fit candidates from applying.

3. Avoid extreme modifiers

When writing a job description, restrict yourself from using over-the-top language like “extraordinary,” “best of the best,” “off the charts,” “world-class,” etc.  Such terms might prevent practical and straightforward applicants from applying.  You should also avoid using words that focus on an extreme set of abilities, such as “perfectionists” or “par excellence.” Again, you risk turning off qualified candidates that could excel in the role.

4. Avoid crafting a long list of roles and responsibilities

Don’t list daily tasks and unwanted qualifications in your job descriptions. Instead, provide the key job responsibilities in 5-7 bullet points or better divide your roles and responsibility under different categories such as “Technical Skills,” “Management Skills,” “Communication,” and “leadership.” This provides your job description objectivity.  Here you can also describe how this job will contribute to the business objectives of the company and the scope of development for an applicant. Do you want candidates to feel excited about your company? If so, tell them your company’s welfare schemes designed for the employees’. You can add your business’s achievements and transformation journey in this section.

In addition, while writing a job description, make sure it is also exciting and contains engaging content for the applicants. No matter how attractive your job offer is, you might face a talent crunch on your job board when interviewing if it’s not presented interestingly.

5. Engage current employees

Writing job descriptions isn’t a part of daily professional activities. Hence, it resides somewhere in the HR department for a long time. These descriptions are often static and don’t reflect the needs of trending skills, culture, and work ethics. To address this issue, it is always sensible to take the help of current employees and incorporate their valuable suggestions in the job description when writing it. Such steps could make your Job description a progressive and exciting offer for the applicants.

Above are five valuable tips that definitely will improve your skills to craft an effective job description and engage star talent.

Are you looking for more tips and techniques to access and appoint a highly talented candidate for your company? If yes, Jobma is here to help you enrich your workforce with top professionals in the market. You can also request a free demo to know more about How Jobma can help you hire the right talent for the position.