First-hand lessons from Broadridge, Chicago Trading Company, and Zillow on revamping job descriptions for a better candidate experience
Whether your company has 10 job openings or 10,000, job ads are the first chance you have to really showcase your employer brand to job-seekers. In that way, job posts are just like product advertisements. However, instead of asking someone to buy something, you’re asking them to make a life-changing decision. #NBD.
Despite this fact, it seems like most hiring teams take a mad scientist approach to their job posts. You use an old job post as a starting point. Your supervisor adds their two cents. The recruiting or brand or legal team adds some company-specific language. The result? A Franken-listing with a couple more arms and legs than it really needs. Another outcome: you end up with language that might misalign with the brand values you want to share with the world.
Often, job descriptions are just not treated with the same amount of care as another type of ad would be. While grammar and typos may not statistically turn off job seekers, they are definitely embarrassing for your brand. Ad agencies have teams of copywriters reviewing every word, but likely your team can’t afford to do that. So what’s the answer?
We turned to some of our most successful customers to find out how they build more quality and brand consistency in their job descriptions, which ultimately gives them better hiring outcomes.
Vice President, Head of Talent Acquisition, Broadridge
“One of the first things I tackled after joining Broadridge was a push to improve the consistency of our job posts. At first I was concerned, I would say to my team, ‘Wait a second. You can’t have typos in a job post. We have to have a structure. We have to represent Broadridge consistently, each and every time.’
“I tried different strategies to improve the consistency and the writing of our job posts, and some turned out great but many were all over the map.
“When we first looked at Textio Hire, our initial scores were in the 30s. Once we started using Textio Hire, I could immediately see the difference. Our job descriptions were definitely more professional, more crisp. Textio Hire created a structure through the writing and approvals process that provided us consistency in how we wrote our job descriptions. Now, we’re using similar words. We’re describing roles in the same way. It allowed Broadridge to put a better foot forward and improve our brand.”
Vice President of Recruiting, Zillow Group
“Last year we made employer branding more of a key priority at Zillow Group. We had this inclination that by building a consistent candidate experience, we would improve our response rate. In the past, we didn’t have consistent job posts — some were too long, or had unnecessary requirements, some were too short. We worked on two things in parallel. First, we partnered with Textio Hire to help us with the language creation to ensure our job descriptions were inclusive and appealed to a more broad set of applicants. We also built a set of best practices that helped to give every job description a similar look and feel.
“We rolled out Textio Hire and our best practices to all of our hiring managers. I thought it was going to be one of the hardest things: to have to re-brand, re-do all of our descriptions, and get everyone on board. But it honestly was so easy to get adoption.
“We really wanted to engage with talent through a different lens than we had before. We went live with a new version of our Zillow Group website with an updated Careers page — completely new language and imagery. At the same time, we updated all of our job descriptions through Textio Hire. That was really our first step of many we’ve taken to present ourselves in a new way to the market. And we’ve been happy with the outcomes.”
CIO and Recruiting Coordinator, Chicago Trading Company
“We value and are known for our ability to work collaboratively. Prior to using Textio, both the hiring managers and recruiting would work together, but lacked a true process to support it. And unfortunately, that left us with a lot of inconsistencies in our job descriptions. When we implemented Textio Hire, we immediately saw how the software supported our team-oriented culture. Now we could easily have recruiting and hiring managers collaborate on job posts in the platform. It made it so easy for people to work together on a job post to get the best results.
“Since using Textio our job postings look better. They read better. People respond to them better. In some cases, it’s helped us clarify one role versus another because it cleaned up our writing a little bit. We think about what we are really trying to say.”
