Spending the hours of sifting and organizing each and every resume receive for a job opening can be exhausting, and rather repetitive. As you search you’re going through thousands of similar resumes, and yet you’re trying to find the one person that seems to be a perfect fit for your company.
Getting resumes to come in isn’t the difficult part, it’s much more difficult to get the right type of applicants for the job (making your job easier). To help your job listing stand out and attract the best types of people, start by spicing up your job descriptions.
Begin with the title. You don’t want a vague title, or anything too short and sweet. It needs to be specific and detailed. For instance, avoid “Administrative Assistant” and replace it with something along the lines of, “Highly organized and multi-tasking administrative assistant in very busy law firm –Min. 2 Years Experience.” This seems much more specific and immediately states requirements, which will prevent those under qualified (hopefully) from submitting a resume.
Include necessary skills in the job description. Using either bullet points of a numbered list provide a very organized list of requirements that must be met in order to be considered for the job opening. This will help lower the number of under-qualified candidates from applying.
Find a way to be different. Many companies are slowly moving away from text-based job descriptions and are now providing videos and other ways to recruit. This can help your company stand out from others.
Provide Information about the company. It’s important to not only sell the position to the candidates, but to sell the company as well. You want to throw all you can at the potential candidates, providing all paid holidays, benefits, bonuses and salary. The more specific information you provide, the more interested candidates should be.
Along with these tips it’s also great to follow your competition to see how they are doing with their job descriptions, etc. After all, you may be fighting them for the best candidates. And you should always send a follow-up letter to candidates once you receive their resume. This is simply the polite thing to do, if even they are not fit or qualified for the position.
And remember, having spicy job descriptions takes time and lots of editing to reach perfect. At the end of the process, it will all be worth it!