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.

Now that the Super Bowl is over, we take a look back on the human resources and recruiting trends, what has driven hiring and engagement innovation, and what’s in store for HR for 2013 when it comes to HR Tech and collaboration.

I’m taking an unconditional approach to workforce predictions and trends because when we speak of trends, untrendy stuff are the things that are actually trends in the industry we work, life and maybe even love. HR is not sexy and yet it is so important in the future of our business in being competitive, healthy, and successful.  Trends for actual HR practitioners is not a trend.  It’s the reality we are living now.

In 2013, HR tech and recruiting technology will shift to mobile, make relationships more real, leverage big data, and empower HR to be more than cogs in the machine:

• A shift from mobile recruiting to mobile work & life.  This trend isn’t really about having a mobile recruiting website so much as it is that the candidate and employee audience is moving to a multi-device and option-filled lifestyle.  In addition to a mobile careers page you should be interacting with candidates on their most popular apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. We are working while living and that happens while doing many things at one time.  Television has become interactive as we tweet (over 24 million tweets during last nights Super Bowl), watch videos and check our email on the same device or multiple ones all at the same time.  Your recruiting and employee engagement strategy should be interactive and engaging on the many channels of life.

• Making relationships real.  Moving from automated relationships and the candidate experience to focusing on the actual relationship and the long-term aggregate benefit of educating, helping, and assisting job seekers even if they don’t work for us right now but possibly at a future point in time.

• Focus on data, data, and more data.  As practitioners in the industry we know the value of our role in the organization.  We often view this measure or metric as elusive for our industry.  With all the buzz surrounding big data, companies and talent departments should be focusing on understanding the business and finding ways to articulate the benefits of what they do in a way that our senior leaders understand.  Numbers are just numbers until we put real meaning behind them.  That’s part of what improved technologies and efficiencies will help us do in HR.

• Technology that makes us more than cogs in the machine.  I feel like there is a belief that HR and recruitment technologies will completely end the need for human resources and recruiters.  Automation helps us focus on the human elements of our most valuable business resource, the employee.  This technology should help elevate the human element taking us away from viewing employees as replicable cogs in the hiring machine to employees with lives, experiences, and personalities you can’t automate.

What other trends are you seeing when it comes to technology, recruiting and the human capital industry?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. When she talks, people listen. 

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to post a job, manage candidates and make the right hire.

For the masses, mobile serves as a form of a virtual and research assistant, providing us instant access to directions, product reviews, and social connects. So why not jobs? It starts with a mobile career site.  The use of mobile devices has become a mainstream trend with 6.8 million Android and iOS devices (Apple devices like iPhone, iPad, and iPod) activated on Christmas Day.

As an iPhone 4GS user, I see a lot of potential with voice and intelligent smart phone devices like Siri.  If I can program Siri to remind me to stop by the store, why not program her to make me aware of job openings as I make my morning commute. With Siri and other mobile recruiting technologies, the job seeker can apply hand frees, with only his or her voice.

For the hiring company, the intelligent virtual assistant provides the same opportunity. Companies can be alerted by voice when someone,  who is a highly coveted candidate, changes their LinkedIn status, or happens to check in with their GPS nearby.

This could take a business’s mobile recruiting effort to another level. Think this possibility is far off?  Don’t.  I have spoken with a handful of HR technology companies who admit that their engineers are researching and building programs to make this dream a reality.

Mobile recruiting starts with a mobile compatible website, a mobile compatible career site, engagement on social channels, and the use of text messaging, but there are more mobile techniques to consider. Mobile technologies offer a million different possibilities to connect directly with the candidate away from their desktop computer. But this accessibility is not without challenges. Instant access provides the opportunity to overwhelm the candidate instead of gently nudging them into apply for a job opening or a quick meeting over coffee. The key to mobile recruiting will remain providing value and focusing on the candidate experience for the entire hiring and selection process, mobile included.

So Where Do You Think Mobile Recruiting is Heading?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers. 

Photo Credit The Thinker via Mariner Project Video Credit Siri Says Some Funny Things (MacMost Special Edition)

Mobile recruiting, in its purest form, is the act of recruiting or engaging candidates on a mobile device. Using mobile devices to recruit candidates includes many different forms and involves many different devices, such as a smart phone, cell phone, tablet, or iTouch.  Mobile recruiting can be the use of mobile devices for either the candidate or the recruiter, and it supplements any social and internet recruiting strategy. When making your company’s recruitment strategy, consider the many apps, technologies, and tools that already out there and developed for the company’s benefit.

Mobile recruiting involves any action or conversation regarding the job search using a mobile device. This could include an app that aids in candidate sourcing or pushes notifications when a candidate applies or  schedules an interview, or even reads QR Code for use at job fairs. According to Mashable, mobile recruiting is on rise in the job seekers mind: 19% of job seekers use mobile devices to search for jobs, but 57% of job seekers would like to use mobile devices to search for jobs. Technology will catch up to the job seeker. While best practice of mobile recruiting is still evolving to candidate behavior, it is clear that companies should have a mobile recruiting strategy going forward.

“For employers, mobile is the new paradigm shift,”  states mobile recruiting expert Michael Marlatt.

Tools exist to make the hiring and interview process easy and mobile-ready for the job seeker as well. These include mobile ready web sites, audio job listings, and text message alerts for job seekers who are mobile, active, and on the go. Mobile is especially appealing for this reason. Recruiters and companies can engage job seekers anywhere and at any time. A quick text message for a recruiter to alert a job seeker offers a real-time opportunity to engage. Job seekers don’t have to wait to be in front of a computer to apply, or receive email about a job. Job seekers want to be able to easily research and apply for your position without being tied to a computer.

Creating and executing a mobile recruiting campaign doesn’t have to be expensive. It can be as simple, complicated, inexpensive, or expensive as you wish it to be. Let’s start with easy, here are three budget friendly ways to leverage mobile recruiting:

• Schedule Candidate Interviews via Text. Enterprise text message systems serve as a form of CRM. Make it easy for your Generational Y candidate pool by scheduling and communicating the details regarding their interview via text. Offer to send interview location and directions via their cell phone linking to a simple Google Map. Candidates can easily create a route using their Maps app while also having the option to receive directions via emails.

• Make Applying & Research Easy. Your company must be easily accessible on mobile devices. As candidates have more choices – even in this current economic market – it’s important to make it easy for job seekers to learn more about your company, the company culture, and where they could fit in.  This includes open jobs and details of what those jobs actually entail. Mobile formatted career sites make it easier for candidates to quickly view information. Also bear in mind that the traditional employee applications take an average of 45 minutes to complete. Using mobile technologies, and a professional profile, the application process can be snap, sometimes even 60 seconds or less. Consider not only the context of employee applications, but also in the context of building a talent community.

• Leverage Video. One of my most popular online activities via mobile is viewing video. As more people own smartphones and as smartphones get bigger and better, more and more video viewing will be on phones. Whether live streaming or a 5 minute day in the life video or employee testimonial, companies can leverage opportunities to engage their candidate base using the power of mobile video. Video provides insights into the environment and company culture that we can see and hear creating a lasting impact that goes beyond any job fair brochure.

The opportunities when it comes to recruiting using a mobile device are an unlimited as your imagination. Mobile recruiting doesn’t have to break the bank, with the right tools it can be effective and inexpensive when companies have a basic understanding of candidate bases’ habits and behaviors.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers.