When you’re looking to find the perfect person to fill a remote spot in your team, you have to start with the perfect remote job advertisement. Doing so will improve the quality of candidates at the top of your recruitment funnel. 

Perhaps it’s your first time hiring remotely, and you’re not sure what to include in the job posting. Maybe you’ve already got remote team members, but you’ve been having issues with the hiring process. Well, have no fear! Below, you’ll find four tips from the distributed workforce experts, Remote-how, on how to write the perfect posting for remote jobs and find the super star candidates you need to succeed.

Do the Research

This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of creating a new job advertisement. Have a look at your competitors and similar roles they are offering on their careers page. You’re probably looking for similar kinds of candidates, so it’s a good idea to check the requirements they’re asking for.

Take note of the skills they are looking for, as well as how they prioritize and communicate relevant information in the posting. These points will probably make up the core of your own job listing, and will help you to avoid forgetting any important details.

You can also use this method to get inspiration for the formatting of your advertisement. Some well-known companies that frequently hire remotely include Buffer, GitHub, Basecamp and Automattic. Their careers pages are excellent examples of remote job postings to use for reference.

Pro tip: SmartRecruiters platform lets you view example advertisements from other SmartRecruiters customers for inspiration when creating job postings.

Define the Exact Remote Conditions

Many people think remote work entails flexibility in terms of location and schedule. This, of course, is fairly common, but some jobs may require the occasional day in the office or for workers to be available at very specific times.

When writing job postings for remote positions, make sure that you explicitly state the terms and conditions. This will make sure that you don’t get to the interview stage with a candidate, only for them to find out that the remote arrangements aren’t what they’re looking for. 

Specifically, consider the following:

• Can your remote employee travel while working?
• Do they need to work hours according to a particular time zone?
• Will they need to make trips to specific locations at any point throughout the year? 

“During the offer process aside from the standard compensation information, it is essential to specify work hours and time zone expectations, what equipment and resources will be provided by the company, and any fun perks or benefits you plan to offer them as a remote employee. I would also provide the schedule for their first week of onboarding so they can prepare to dive right in!”

Casey Carr Jones, Director & Head of People Operations at Remote Year.

Below is a posting for a remote content writer position with Buffer. You’ll notice that they clearly define working hours, specifically which time zone candidates should be in. This sets the correct expectation for their remote arrangements up front.

Get Your Team Involved in Drafting the Advertisement

If you’re managing a team of multiple remote team members, it will be especially important to get them involved while drafting the job posting. By virtue of distance, you might not always be aware of their paint points or which additional skills they could benefit from in a new hire.

In an office environment, keeping up to date with hiring happens fairly naturally. Here in the remote world, you’ll have to make sure to over-communicate HR processes and hiring plans. By letting your team know and allowing them to voice their needs and concerns, you’ll have a better chance of hiring someone who will be a better fit for your team and its objectives.

To that end, we recommend the following two-step process before posting job advertisements:

1. Notify your team of the position you’re hiring for and ask for recommendations and any requirements they may need or can recommend. 
2. Following this, draft your job posting and present it again to the team. Allow for review, take notes on feedback and then make a final decision on the advertisement. The process needs to be cooperative and fit everyone’s needs to maximize new hire success.

A Remote Job Requires Different Skills, Benefits, and Perks

If you’ve only hired for on-site workers, you should think about the skills you’ve specified previously in requisitions, and whether or not they’ll translate for remote workers. Nine times out of ten they won’t! While both traditional candidates and remote ones will need more or less the same technical and hard skills, it will be especially important for remote workers to have certain soft skills like problem solving, time management, and communication. Since they’ll be working independently, it will be essential for remote workers to be organized self-starters capable of meeting deadlines without direct supervision.

Also make sure to mention any great remote-based perks that you have! It’s no use talking about a membership to a local gym by the office when your employee is possibly thousands of miles away in another country.

In the same content writer posting referenced above, Hotjar also takes care to clearly state the benefits available to remote staff.

Conclusion

We think you’ll find the tips outlined in this article very useful when posting requisitions for remote candidates. For actionable advice on the next step in the hiring process—conducting remote interviews—be sure to check out this informative post.

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With candidates viewing a job ad for less than a minute on average, recruiters can’t waste time with these common mistakes.

Picture this. It’s Friday morning. You’re ready for another great day of recruiting, a steaming coffee sits on the desk next to you. This is your zen place.

You fire up your laptop, ready to write a stellar job ad, when it hits you – this seemingly simple copy is actually super important! You can’t just write a ‘whatever’  job ad. This post will be the first point of contact for candidates to the open role, and maybe even your company.

You start downing your coffee and typing furiously. ‘This ad has to be perfect!’ you think. ‘Unless I want to have as much impact as a fly has on a windshield.’

Well, not to alarm you further, but according to a recent study, most job seekers spend a measly 49.7 seconds reviewing a job ad before clicking away.

So, it’s clear the stakes are high, but let’s return to our calm place… put down the coffee, give your keyboard a break, and let’s go over the hallmarks of a successful job ad, and the terrible, no-good, please-don’t-do-thats to avoid at all costs.

1. Sugar-Coating the Company Culture

When writing a job posting, you want to reflect your organization’s culture and connect back to your core values. Now, what you don’t want to do is sugarcoat things and mention values your company doesn’t actually live.  Make sure you are being upfront in your job ads to attract top talent with the right mix of hard and soft skills that would make a great cultural fit.

Why?

If you say your company is ‘all about work-life balance’ when really you expect workers to pull long nights and be reachable at all times, the charade will be up once the new hire starts. Ultimately, the reality will hit them that they were sold a false bill of goods. When that happens, be prepared to see them leave and don’t be surprised when the negative Glassdoor review follows.

Here’s an example of how to be real about your company culture:

We are looking for a Social Media Marketing Specialist who thrives on teamwork and accountability. If you are not OK with hard startup culture, this place might not be a good fit for you…

2. Staying Silent on Benefits and Perks

Lean on your strengths. If your company has great benefits or perks be sure to flaunt them — remote work options, dog-friendly environment, stellar dental plan, public transit passes, whatever it is, candidates will be interested.

Why?

Having selling points in your job ads that showcase how different you are, sets you apart from the competition. Creating these positive differentiators is important, especially if your brand is relatively unknown.

Here is an example of how to showcase benefits:

If you join our team, you won’t have to leave your furry friend alone at home all day, here at our company we have a dog-friendly office. Speaking of friendly, we are also eco-friendly, we encourage our employees to make use of public transit by offering free monthly passes.

3. Using Meaningless Buzzwords

We all want to hire someone who is: A laser-focused self-starter who can hit the ground running with a blue sky thinking to join our team.

So while you might think that cramming your job advert with buzzwords and fancy wording can make you sound more knowledgeable, it actually comes off as vague and lazy; it may even negatively affect your application rate.

Why?

Did you know that 64 percent of job seekers will not apply for a position if they do not understand what it is about? So, make sure to use specific and simple language that actually resonates with your audience. (If you don’t know who your audience is, this article can help you define your candidate persona.)

Here’s an example of a job ad with specific language:

“The ideal candidate is a product manager with a deep understanding of programmatic advertising and machine learning algorithms as they relate to job boards, advertising, and overall job distribution.” – SmartRecruiters, Product Manager Job Post.

4. Not Going Mobile Friendly

Here is some food for thought: Only 42 percent of recruitment sites are mobile friendly, yet 50 percent of candidates use their smartphones to look for and apply to jobs.

Why?

Mobile search is easy! People scroll through ads while watching TV, or maybe even at work. If you manage to tick the mobile box, you will be able to tap into a much larger candidate pool.

Here’s an easy checklist:

• Under 700 words
• Optimized for one-click apply
• Formatted to fit mobile screens

(Check out common mistakes of mobile recruiting!)

Final Thoughts

Often, the best candidates are already employed aka ‘passive talent’, but that shouldn’t dissuade your recruiting efforts. In fact, 51percent of those who do have jobs are searching for new ones or watching for openings. So, your job ad still counts!

If you manage to avoid these job advertisement writing pitfalls, you will max out the odds of sourcing your next Elon Musk.

Even if you live under a rock, in the middle of a dense forest, surrounded by a desert wasteland, you still know that recruiting is now a mobile game.

The average person will spend over four hours on their devices each day. If you assume the recommended eight hours of sleep, this means that 25 percent of a peron’s waking day is spent on a mobile device. The majority of this time is eaten up by browsing social media (over two hours, according to Statista) and firing off an endless stream of texts (almost a half hour each day).

That said, people do use their mobile devices for more practical tasks as well, including searching for jobs. A 2014 study performed by Censuswide, and funded by Indeed.com, found that 65 percent of people were using mobile devices while looking for new jobs. This number grew as high as 77 percent in younger age brackets.

This is a staggering majority that cannot be overlooked by recruiters. Mobile recruiting, while still a relatively new trend, is a vital branch that needs to be incorporated into any company’s hiring strategy.

Unfortunately, the infancy of this trend means that recruiters are still forming their understanding of the best practices when approaching mobile users with career opportunities. To help facilitate that learning, here are three mistakes that organizations need to avoid when approaching mobile recruitment.

Check out SmartRecruiters mobile recruiting here!

1. Failing To Adapt Job Posts To The Mobile Environment

Convenience is one of the most common reasons cited for job seekers turning to mobile. The same Censuswide, Indeed.com survey found that convenience was the number one motivator for mobile job searchers. That convenience is severely damaged when recruiters fail to adapt their job posts to the mobile environment. With smaller screens and touch navigation, mobile users have vastly different browsing behaviors from desktop applicants.

Your mobile recruitment posts need to provide the necessary information to entice applicants and ensure that they understand the position, its duties, and the requirements. But, too much information is overwhelming for mobile users that are staring at a much smaller screen. Not to mention, these individuals have notoriously short attention spans.

UPS has been a leader in online recruiting for nearly two decades. Realizing that browsing social media and watching videos are two of the most common mobile activities, they made sure to target Facebook and Twitter users with job posts and incorporate videos, instead of large blocks of text, in their job descriptions. This allowed them to reduce hiring costs from $600-700 to just $60-70.

2. Lacking A Mobile Career Portal

Alongside their social media and video-enabled mobile recruitment, UPS also leverages a mobile app designed to be a communication channel between the company and applicants. Both sides find value from this addition to mobile recruiting. Applicants can ask questions and receive additional information vital to their hiring.

UPS, on the other hand, can use these initial conversations to more accurately target the right employees for interviews. This has had a dramatic impact on improving their interview-hire ratio to 2:1.

In short, offering some mobile career portal, or app, that enhances your mobile recruitment is a huge advantage. This is especially true with younger applicants in the millennial generation because these job seekers are so mobile-centric.

3. Forgetting to Track Results

Data has become an invaluable and unavoidable tool in today’s always-connected world. We’re producing data at absolutely wonky rates. In one report from 2017, there was a total of 2.7 Zettabytes of data in the “digital universe.” Translated into gigabytes, let’s say it is a lot of zeroes, with more being added every second.

If you ask your marketing department how much they use data to inform decisions, they’ll likely talk your ear off. So, why not incorporate data into your mobile recruitment strategies? If you aren’t continually testing your job postings, in terms of message and channel, then how will you determine what’s working? Mobile users search differently, which means they may be using different keywords than expected to find job posts.

Google’s People Analytics team (a Google-ized name for their HR department) used data from their past interviews to determine what questions and practices in their hiring process yielded high-performing employees. They found that specific tactics, which they long presumed were effective, actually added no value to the equation. Thus, they removed them from their hiring tactics.

So…

These mistakes can be crippling to mobile recruiting, but they are very avoidable. By spending more time analyzing your mobile recruitment efforts and creating hiring experiences that are designed for the mobile user, you’ll see more, qualified applicants entering your onboarding process.

Here is a step-by-step how-to guide for writing the perfect vacancy announcement.

1. Write a descriptive job title

Always follow this golden rule: write a job title that is simple and engaging at the same time. While job titles like ‘Full-Stack Frontend Ninja’, ‘Content Creative’, or anything to do with superheroes are common, they aren’t actually fit for purpose, i.e. clarifying what exactly the position is. Avoid jargon and make sure to use relevant, searchable keywords. If you’re looking for an SEO-focused Online Marketer, you should clearly express this in the job title.

2. Positively introduce the company

Your company description needs to be short, snappy and interesting to capture the attention of potential candidates very quickly. More detailed company information should be moved to the end of the post for interested parties that want to learn more about the company. Always include the following information:

Who are you?

What is the company offering the position? What products or services do you offer? What is the company mission? Do you operate internationally? Make sure to list any awards, major achievements or anything that you think makes you an interesting employer.

Why are you hiring?

Clarify exactly why the company is hiring. Is the company expanding? Are you restructuring? Do you need cover for parental leave? Make sure that a potential candidate knows exactly what to expect.

3. Describe the position

In a short paragraph, briefly, describe the position being offered using positive language, but be realistic and avoid using hyperbole. Use bullet points to list the most important responsibilities and any relevant obligations to make it easier to scan. What kind of experience level will be expected of the candidate? Will they have to manage a team? Does this role report directly to the CEO? How big are the company and the team in which they’ll be working? Jargon is out of place here, so make sure to use common expressions that everyone can understand.

4. List specific skills and requirements

Now, switch your focus from the position to the candidate. What should the person bring to the position? It’s a good idea to divide this list into ‘must-haves’ and ‘good-to-haves’, e.g. perhaps fluent English is a must-have, and any other languages are a plus!

Any Visa or legal requirements should be listed here too, keeping in mind current legislation. For example, in many countries, it’s illegal to specify gender, ethnicity or any other detail that may be considered discriminatory. As an example, in Germany, it’s illegal to specify ‘Native German speaker’/’German as mother tongue’ as a requirement. The correct way to express the required language level is to say ‘Fluent German’/’Native-level German’. Make this list very brief and to the point.

What personal qualities would the ideal candidate have? Rather than just listing traits (e.g. good communicator) it’s a good idea to describe behaviour like, “As Comms Manager, you need to be able to write precise, print-ready texts under pressure”. Only list points that are relevant to the position, and don’t overdo it! Again, no ninjas required.

5. Describe what sets you apart as an employer

Candidates aren’t only looking for a suitable position, they’re also looking for a great company. In a short paragraph, describe what candidates can expect from you. What is the company culture like? What does a normal day look like at the office? What benefits do you offer to employees? What do you offer employees in terms of personal and professional development, including any seminars, workshops or training?

6. Give details on what happens next

Tell candidates how to apply for this position. How should they submit their documents? Who should they contact with any questions they might have? How exactly does the application process work, and what should they expect if they are called for an interview?

7. Include company background

If you wish, at the end you can add a few vital statistics about the company, e.g. foundation year, list of investors, name(s) of manager(s), etc.

So, it’s not rocket science! In as little text as possible, try to convey as much information as you can. The language that you write it in should, of course, depend on the position and the distribution channels that you use.

If you want to know exactly how successfully your job ads are performing, you can use our free employer’s’ tool which includes a company profile, job ads (also free!), performance and candidate analysis tools, and plenty of scope for employer branding.

Republished from Jobspotting and updated November 14, 2017.

The war for talent is waging. Companies are competing harder than ever for top talent, using a plethora of software ranging from the useful to the absurd.  Yet despite all these changes, the job description of many companies hasn’t evolved since the days of the newspaper classified ad. The same boring text. The same laundry list of requirements. Copy-pasted bullet points that do nothing to actually entice the best candidates to apply.

A job posting should be treated like an advertisement. It is the front lines of your recruiting effort, and the first thing a potential candidate sees. First impressions are everything, especially in a world where job posts are everywhere. It’s up to you to stand out from all the noise.

So, how do you write a better job ads? Tell a better story.

Here are 4 tips to writing job ads:

1.     Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal candidate.

Who do you want applying to your job?  If you’re looking to attract top talent, you need to connect with them. Think about what these people are looking for in an opportunity.

According to Workopolis, these are the top 5:

1. Work environment
2. Career advancement opportunities
3. Work/Life balance
4. Location
5. Compensation

And I’d take this a step further. Great people want to work on interesting challenges. They want to work with other great people. They want to make an impact.

Ask yourself a simple question before posting: Would I apply to this job?

2.     Focus on the Why

Don’t use all your real estate detailing exactly what skills are required for the job. Spend time selling candidates on why they should leave their cushy jobs to join you to change the world. You’re competing against tons of recruiters and companies better known than Justin Bieber, and the only way to compete is by being unique. Even though you can’t offer the perks of Google, focus on what makes your opportunity special. Really dig into the reasons why the job matters, and get that message across.

3.     Put a bullet in the bullet points

Yes, I’m sure you’re looking for unicorns with 30 years of experience in Javascript who also happen to have designed the first color TV, but the reality is that the best people are not going to apply to your boring job description. Having impossible requirements isn’t going to change that. Focus on selling to top people, not cutting out the unqualified. Stay focused on what skills truly matter for the job, and keep the bullet points to a minimum.

But, won’t I get more spammy resumes? No. The people who are sending their resumes to everyone will still send you their resume. Less bullet points doesn’t mean more unqualified volume, but it might mean that the most awesome people will give your company a chance.

And do you really need to mention that you’re looking for hard-working, team players? We know.

4.     Get personal

What matters as much as the job itself? The company you’re applying for.  Don’t leave this out of the job ad. People don’t apply for jobs, they apply for companies. So let them know why you’re so awesome.

Cover the basics like benefits, perks, and what you do for fun. If you’re trying to attract folks who care about your kegerator, mention your kegerator. Remember to keep the ad true to your culture, and be honest. If you don’t have daily shiatsu massages, revisit point number two. Perks are great, but true impact is even more so.

How do you write a compelling job ad? Bold question. Check out how personal and connected you feel to this job ad by 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried. So, how do you write a compelling job ad? The real answer is that it depends. The key is to be authentic and focus on what matters most to your company. What is the best job ad you’ve ever seen?

[Editor’s Note: The job ad above was so compelling that it inspired the movie, “Safety Not Guaranteed.” Yeah, you read that right, a job ad inspired a real Hollywood movie (trailer below). For another culturally significant job ad, read “The Onion: The Listening Internship.”]

Download our new White Paper to learn about “The Evolution of Job Posting.” Want to add your job board to the SmartRecruiters Store? Express Interest Here.