Too many applications? Your job post isn't helping.
By Mitch Sullivan,
Are you getting hundreds of applications to your job posts? Sometimes thousands?
The biggest reason is probably the market. There are a lot of available people in that job discipline right now. That part isn’t your doing.
Are most of those applications nowhere near suitable?
That part is. The biggest reason is they didn’t read the job post.
Why they didn’t read it
Then you have to ask yourself why. The answer is usually because it was too long and too boring and often goes by the name of a ‘job description’. To most people, a job description reads like a really long ransom note.
When an ad is that hard to read, people look at the title and the salary and hit apply. With one-click applications, that takes seconds.
Don’t blame the applicant
Many blame the applicant and dismiss them as lazy or stupid. But all these people are doing is playing the numbers game. If applying costs nothing and the odds on any single application are low, you send a lot of them.
Recruiters should know something about that. It’s the same logic behind a hundred unanswered InMails.
It’s the recruiter’s fault
I blame the recruiter for not making the job post easy to read.
If it’s easy to read and the candidate requirements are explicit, many of these applicants won’t apply. Most of them are probably desperate for a job, but they still won’t waste time on one they can see they won’t get.
The majority of people don’t want to apply for jobs they know they have no chance of getting. And if the job post is easy to read and explicit about what’s needed, they’ll know.
What explicit looks like
Few and specific. There are rarely more than two or three real ‘must-haves’ for any role - and they’re almost always about skill, knowledge or experience. ‘Five years managing commercial property portfolios’ tells someone whether they qualify. ‘Strong communicator’ doesn’t. Everyone believes that about themselves.
Keep the list short. A long list of nice-to-haves filters the wrong way. Qualified people read ‘desirable’ as ‘required’ and rule themselves out rather than risk the rejection. The people who didn’t read it apply anyway.
Put it at the top
If you really are filling a job in a discipline that’s candidate rich at the moment, put the candidate requirements section right at the top of the job post. Straight after the title, location and salary.
That goes against most advice about job ads, including mine. When good people are scarce, the ad’s first job is to give someone who’s already employed a reason to keep reading, so the reasons they might be interested in the job go first. When you’ve got more applicants than you can read, the first job changes. It’s to help the wrong people leave quickly.
When there really is an abundance of suitable candidates, you don’t need to work as hard to sell the job. But you do still need to make it easy to read and that’s the part most job posts get wrong.
If you want job ads that are easy to read, that’s what mitchs.ai is for.