If you’re a startup making your first hire, you’re probably just going to write a job post from scratch and hope for the best. But for a large enterprise opening thousands of roles every year, keeping all of your hiring teams on the same page (literally) is a huge content management challenge.
Without a way to keep things consistent and current, your job posts will end up sounding the way that Frankenstein looks: stitched together from old body parts. One of your teams includes an outdated EOE statement. Or the job requirements that you’re supposed to include for every role somehow get missed by whoever was copying and pasting into your ATS that day.
A lot of companies use a “job library” to try and control for this problem, but that often makes things even worse. Most companies use templates in a way that’s detrimental not only to their employer brand, but also to their bottom line.
1. Your team is using old, outdated content
When your hiring managers and recruiters start writing a job, they probably pull from an old Word document saved on their desktop. Or worse, they Google a competitor’s job and copy/paste the sections they think are relevant. (You’d be surprised how many people do that!)
2. Newer brand language doesn’t find its way into all of your jobs
If you’ve ever been through a company rebrand, you know that old brand language has a tendency to creep back in the way sand gets into everything at the beach. After all that hard work to re-strategize your market positioning, the last thing you want is for old verbiage to end up on your career page. When your marketing team creates a new mission statement or equal opportunity language, do you know that all of your recruiters are using it? Have all your old templates been updated?
3. Your standardized language has a big (and sometimes bad) impact on how candidates read you
You’ve probably heard about buzzwords to avoid in your job posts. It might surprise you that while you can get away with a word like “ninja” or “rockstar” showing up once or twice, it’s still not as bad as rolling out clichés and biased language across all of your job templates. Brand language has an even bigger impact on your bottom line than most job post text, because it propagates everywhere.
On top of that, the impact of your language changes over time. Textio looked at one customer’s hiring data and observed that, across their hiring results alone, certain brand language was more effective towards helping them hire a balanced team.
How to give your teams the best language possible
Templates don’t have to be a necessary evil of recruiting. There are ways to use templates so that your recruiters stay speedy and on-brand, but also original with their language. Used the right way, they make things easier for your hiring teams and seamless for you! Textio’s template feature offers a way for you to push out standardized brand language to all affected job posts in just a couple of clicks.
Don’t have a central job library? Your hiring teams have probably developed a workaround without you. A lasting solution requires that you offer value for your team good enough to override their habit of copy/pasting. Providing your teams with clear value, like the real-time impact of the language in the templates you’ve selected, is a good way to keep them coming back to the branded, standardized content you’ve worked so hard to create.
What are you doing to justify the extra work they’re doing to make your job posts more consistent?