You step into a restaurant and whether you’re conscious of it or not, the questions immediately start swirling around your head: “is this my first time here?”, “what is this place known for?”, “what did I order last time?”, “how hungry am I?”, “what do I want to eat?”, “what’s the special today?”, “where’s the server?”, “what do they recommend?’, “am I ready to order?”.

Pretty quickly you work your way through your list, place your order and begin eating your meal. No problems.

Your candidates do this exact same thing every time they land in one of your job postings. Before they even click into a posting, whether they’re aware of it or not, they have a list of questions they’re trying answer. Actually, it’s not really a list as much as it’s a prioritized upside-down pyramid of questions (now does the cover photo make sense?) that lead to the ultimate question, “Should I apply or not?”.

For each company, the amount of questions, the order of the questions and the questions themselves may be different, for example, if you’re Nike, Amazon or Netflix, candidates likely aren’t asking who you are or what you do. But a simple example of a candidate question pyramid might look like this:

Carrying our restaurant analogy over, imagine going to a restaurant for the first time and being handed a menu with the name of the restaurant on the front and only the prices on the inside of the menu. No pictures, no list of menu items, just prices. My guess is that you would have a lot of questions and would likely feel pretty frustrated by the experience.

Of course, there are ways for you to find out what each item is. You could ask the server, you could check their website, you could look at Google reviews but all of those things require effort that you probably didn’t think would be necessary before you stepped into the restaurant.

Modern-day job postings are very similar to this. They have some of the information candidates need to answer the questions on their list but not all of the information. There are gaps. And those gaps can make it impossible for a candidate to make a confident decision. Those gaps create a crappy candidate experience.

I’ve had this conversation with many people who tell me, “if they really want to know the missing info, they can click out to our career site”, to which I always clap back, “No, if you really want them to know something, you can include it in your postings”.

And I know what you may be thinking: “Why is this even important? Like we’re talking about a single click right?”

Well, for one, it’s usually more than a single click. And what’s more, candidates expect a smooth, unified experience and sending them on a hunt for the info they need, isn’t good candidate experience. I mean, they’re consumers after all and they — like you — want what they want, now.

What’s worse is that sending them out to the career site means that they lose the context that exists in the job posting, seeing as career sites by nature, focus on answering different questions in the pyramid:

So what can you do to make sure that candidates are getting the experience and info they need in your job postings?

1. Create your own pyramid.

Nobody knows your candidates better than you, your recruiters and your managers. Start by creating your own candidate question pyramid. What questions are your candidates trying to answer when they’re going through your job postings? Which questions aren’t being addressed in your postings? Talk to the people who are interacting with your candidates and start writing down the questions that surface.

2. Imagine your career site doesn’t exist.

Next, imagine that your career site doesn’t exist. Because for many candidates, it doesn’t. For a large cross-section of your candidates, the only interaction they’ll have with your employer brand is a job posting and if they can’t find the answers to their questions, they‘ll bounce. By imagining that your career site doesn’t exist, it should become pretty clear what’s missing from your job postings.

3. Make room.

Find room in your postings to mention the Cliffs Notes version of your benefits package and/or culture highlights. Add a video and perhaps you can even include some of the images/graphics you have on your main career site. Wondering where you can find some of that room? Start by eliminating any of the bullet points in your postings that don’t have any context and go from there.

In the wild

Accolade uses Ruutly to add department-specific, contextual content to every single job posting, above the fold, in order to answer the questions that their candidates might have — without forcing them back out to the career site.

The result is an experience for candidates that doesn’t require them to hunt down the company values or click out to the career site to learn about the culture. Everything happens directly in the job posting.

Each visual contains a couple of different tabs of content, which are specific for that particular team and then a tab with content shared by all teams showing off the company’s values.

While it’s really easy for me to include these examples of how Accolade is using Ruutly, a company that I founded, to do the things I’m talking about, these same things can be done without Ruutly with very little effort, using the tech that you currently use.

If you don’t have a cache of visual content, start by removing some of the ambiguous info in your postings and replace them with a content block or two that answer some of the questions your candidates have.

If you do have some visual and creative content to use, add them to your job posting templates and start giving candidates the information they’re looking for, where it makes the most sense: in your job postings.

You’ve likely spent time, money and energy creating content for your career, why not stretch the value you get from those assets by carrying them over into all of your postings?

Just as you enter a restaurant with a mental list of questions you’re trying to answer, your candidates are landing in your job postings looking for the answers to some very specific questions. Unfortunately, in many cases, they aren’t able to find what they’re looking for.

By documenting and prioritizing the questions that your candidates are trying to answer when visiting your job postings, you can then reverse-engineer your postings to answer those questions. And if you’re able to do that, you’re checking off one of the most important boxes on the Delightful Candidate Experience checklist.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Ruutly helps companies delight candidates directly in job postings, check out www.Ruutly.com or shoot me a message on LinkedIn.

Like what you read in this article? Hit that clap button to let me know to keep creating pieces like this.

TL:DR it’s 2020 and it’s time to ditch the endless bulleted lists of arbitrary “required skills” in our job postings. Replacing “required skills” with “IF” statements create an amazing amount of context for candidates, resulting in a better experience for all.

I want you to imagine that you’re preparing to spend some of your hard-earned money to take a trip to Japan. Because it’s your first time going to Japan, you decide to book a tour. You hit-up Google, find a tour operator, head to their website and click into the Japan itinerary to see this:

Days 1–3: sightseeing things
Days 3–5: travelling to places and eating foods
Days 5–7: staying in hotels and cultural things
Day 8: Go home

Contrast that itinerary with these items pulled from a G Adventures Japan tour:

Day 3: Visit the Jigokudani Monkey Park, where wild snow monkeys can be seen bathing in the natural hot springs. The pool where most of the monkeys soak is man made, fed by the hot springs. Along the walking paths up to the pools, other monkeys tend to stop and watch visitors curiously.
Day 4: Stop at the castle of Matsumoto one of Japan’s most treasured castles, maintaining its original wooden interior and stone exterior. Explore this castle, where 16th century Samurai once roamed, before venturing out with the group to wander Matsumoto’s ancient streets and or dine in a traditional storehouse.

Which is more likely to pique your interest, earn your click and possibly your dollars as well?

So what does this have to do with job postings? Just about everything.

Most job postings are like the first example itinerary: Must have leadership skills, communication skills and problem solving skills.

See the relation?

Candidates arrive at job postings with a list of questions they’re trying to answer and if they’re not getting the context required to answer those questions, they’re forced to interpret your job postings… and those candidate interpretations are where you end up having extremely poor-fit candidates applying. Because when you asked for somebody with “creative problem solving skills”, they believed the time they were cold and microwaved their polyester pants to warm-up, was Mensa-level-genius problem solving. They are definitely qualified for your most recent Senior Data Scientist opening.

How do you give candidates the context they need? You give it to them by telling them exactly what they would’ve done today, or this week, if they were already working in the role you’re hiring for.

In 2010, 37Signals (now Basecamp) lowkey published the G.O.A.T. example of what a job posting should be:

The part I want you to really focus on, is this heading and the list that follows:

Some people may see the list in the image and think, “pffff I can replace all of that by simply writing, Communication Skills.” — and that’s exactly my point.

“Communication skills” can mean so many different things on so many different levels. And if you’re not telling a person exactly how they’ll be using those skills, you’re leaving far too much room for candidate interpretation.

If we’re thinking about this from a candidate experience perspective, which question do you think is easier for a candidate to answer:

Do I have “proficient communication skills”?

OR

Could I “write thank you notes to customers and book two hotel rooms and two flights for out-of-towners”?

Giving context is phenomenal candidate experience and it literally costs $0.00 to provide to candidates.

There are three steps to replacing your traditional skill requirements with clearer context.

Step one: Scrap the skills.

For decades the vast majority of job postings online have included some variation of a “Required Skills” section where recruiters and/or hiring managers include a laundry list of arbitrary skills with zero context and it needs to stop.

It’s time to delete all of the skills from your requirements section. The “Requirements” section of a job posting should be reserved exclusively for credentials, certifications, role-specific experience and relevant education.

Step two: Introduce the “IF”.

This is the most critical step. The “Required skills” section needs to be replaced by an “if” statement and then a list of job-specific tasks. Basecamp’s “if” statement looked like this: “If you were working for us, here are some of the things you would’ve done last week”

But you don’t have to copy them. Find something that works for you, your culture and your tone but here are some examples to get things rolling:

• If you were already in this role, here are some things you would’ve done today:
• If you were currently doing this job, here are some things you would’ve done last week:
• If you were already working as a [job title] at [your company name], here are 5 things you would’ve accomplished today:

Let’s look at an example:

a) In the outdated job posting format, you might see something like: “must be familiar with Microsoft Office”.

Imagine a candidate, fresh out of high school, looking for his first full time job. He used Microsoft Excel in his grade 12 computer class to create a bar graph visualizing “how often they serve tater tots vs grilled cheese” at his school as a project. He’s “familiar with Microsoft Office” and might just click that “Apply” button.

b) In the new format, we use an “if” statement to help him better understand the role: “If you were currently working in this role, today you would’ve: used Microsoft Excel to create a financial model outlining 3 possible revenue and headcount scenarios for the next three years of operations.”

Using this approach allows you to avoid long lists of arbitrary skills and becomes exponentially more helpful for poor-fit and great-fit candidates alike.

Step three: Dismiss the non-specifics

I personally have said it roughly a million times (like here, here and here) but if you are mentioning a skill in your job posting, it must be accompanied by a deliverable or outcome. This is the most important thing to remember when creating context for candidates in your job postings.

You must avoid ambiguity at all costs.

Imagine you’re hiring a sales agent for your credit recovery/collections company, although it may be tempting (and easy) to write: “if you were doing this job today, you would’ve used your customer service skills to assist customers”

It’s much more effective and a better use of everybody’s time and energy to be as specific as possible with something like: “if you were doing this job today, you would’ve spoken with 20–30 customers over the phone, listening to their needs and taking as much time as you needed to put them at ease about their financial recovery options.”

I think we can agree that the second example provides candidates with much more insight as to how they will use their communication skills and what they will achieve as a result.

Just like you would want the exact details about a travel itinerary before spending your time and money on a specific tour, candidates want — and deserve — more context before spending their time and energy applying for a job. The best way to give them that context is to introduce a few simple “if” statements in your job postings as a replacement for the old-school, over-bulleted, overly-ambiguous, “required skills” section.

If you like what you’ve just read, have something to add or think I’ve missed the mark on something, I’d love to hear from you. Send me a note on LinkedIn anytime.

Oh, and feel free to hit that applause button to let us know that you like this type of content.

The two most important letters missing from your job postings was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not too long ago, my wife’s friend from her high school days was in town visiting and my wife thought it would be a great idea for the three of us to go out for dinner together. We met her friend near the hotel she was staying at and headed to a local eatery.

After a few basic questions and polite convo, my wife and her friend — who grew up together, on the other side of the planet — immediately began reminiscing, giving updates on friends I’ve never met and talking about places I’ve never been. Me? I spent the night smiling, nodding and having no idea who or what they were talking about.

And that’s exactly how candidates feel when they land on job postings.

Far too often, job postings are a closed conversation between legal, marketing and talent acquisition, and candidates have no idea what they’re talking about.

We’ve said it more times than I’d like to count but context is the only king when it comes to job postings and in most cases, context ends up on the back of a milk carton. Missing.

Companies typically have no problem giving context on their career site but that context, for one reason or another, is lost in the click(s) between the career site and an actual job posting.

What’s worse, is that because most candidates are coming from social, email or some other source, they don’t even see the career site. They have zero context whatsoever.

Some larger, well-known companies have the advantage here because they’re, well, known. Candidates may have experienced the brand before or have a basic idea of what that company does and what they offer to candidates. And while they lack the finer details of the description, department, duties and day-to-day, candidates likely have an idea of what they’re jumping into.

If we’re carrying the conversation analogy over, a well-known company is like joining a conversation with a celebrity. You may not know them intimately but you probably know enough to carry a conversation.

But if your company is somewhat less-known, or unknown to the candidate, it’s that much more important to include context in your postings, both for the role, and depending on your company and goals, the company itself.

And I’m not talking about using your job description to tell candidates the company founding story or stock price. I’m talking about giving them a snapshot of the company, the team, the benefits and a few reasons they may want to click the ‘Apply’ button.

I’m not going to go over what context looks like for your company but I think it makes sense to take a look at what context looks like for some of the companies we work with.

[DISCLAIMER: the following companies are customers of Ruutly and are using Ruutly to achieve some of the following. However, Ruutly is not a pre-requisite for an outstanding, in-posting candidate experience]

Siemens

Imagine being a candidate browsing LinkedIn and clicking on a recruiter’s post for a job at Siemens. Siemens definitely falls into the category of the “celebrity conversation” mentioned above but what questions do you think the candidate would have?

Maybe questions like, how big is Siemens? What team would I be on? What does that team do? Who would I be working with?

Siemens is doing their best to answer those questions directly in their job postings, above the fold, in a way that is totally aligned with candidate expectations.

Take a look at how they’re doing that:

They’re answering candidate questions before they have a chance to ask them. Above the fold Siemens is giving the high level information a candidate may wish to know and they’re doing this in their job postings.

Every company uses different names for their internal brands, job families and business segments, it’s easy for candidates to be confused by the terminology. Siemens recognizes this and tackles it head-on by including information about their internal brands and even includes videos to help tell the story.

In a subset of their job postings, Siemens goes the extra, extra mile by introducing candidates to people who work on those teams. And instead of a smiling face and a text quote, they include video where candidates can “meet” that person.

Johnson & Johnson

J&J is definitely another example of a conversation with a celebrity. But again, what questions do you think candidates have about them if they’re clicking into a career site job posting from social, email or a job board?

J&J knows that candidates are interested in the types of benefits they offer their employees because they have incredible benefits and it’s one of the biggest factors candidates generally consider before clicking the Apply button.

Instead of tucking those benefits away on their career site, they also put them front and centre of their job postings.

Johnson & Johnson knows what their candidates are looking for and they don’t shy away from answering those questions up front, where it matters to candidates.

On the surface, this is a great way to communicate those benefits directly but it’s also doing something else: building trust through transparency.

J&J isn’t hiding that information. They’re making it completely accessible to every candidate before they ask those questions. And that’s what candidates want.

Workfront

Now imagine being a candidate and seeing this on your LinkedIn feed:

Maybe you think, “Oh, Workfront! I’ve heard great things about them! I’d love to work there” or maybe you don’t know exactly who they are or what they do. So you click the link to land on a job posting that looks like this:

Within seconds a candidate can get a sense of what the role is about. And if the candidate spends a few more seconds, they can understand what’s important to the people at Workfront:

And a couple of more seconds allows candidates to understand the kind of company Workfront is and the culture their people are crafting.

For the examples above, I used the word “imagine” to prompt you to think about what questions candidates want answered by the companies mentioned. Why? Because chances are you aren’t working for their Talent Acquisition teams.

When it comes to your company however, you don’t need to imagine what questions your candidates want answered. You have access to your candidates, you know what questions they ask again and again. And chances are, there is some way to work the answers to those critical questions into your job postings.

I completely understand that this post seems like a giant showcase of what Ruutly can help with. And it partially is. But you don’t need to add technology to your recruiting stack to crank the volume on context in your job postings. You have access to the things you need to make that happen right now.

Candidates want to be in on the conversation that you’re having. And with a few tweaks to what you’re talking about and how you’re talking about it, you have power to involve, engage and convert right-fit candidates.

If you enjoyed this article, let us know by giving it some applause.

More importantly, we’d love to work with you in helping elevate the candidate experience in your job postings. Even if it doesn’t include using Ruutly, send us a note with your questions and we’ll help any way that we can.

Are Candidates Really Part of Your Conversation? was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Leadership skills. Communication skills. Customer service skills. Teamwork skills. How many times have you used those terms in job descriptions?

There’s a massive problem with each one of those. They literally mean nothing.

What’s worse, is because those terms are so incredibly ambiguous, if you’re not explaining what those skills mean to your organization and the specific role you’re hiring for, you’re leaving it completely up to the candidate to interpret them. And more often than not, they’ll get it completely wrong.

In this video, Jahmal and I share a simple formula to instantly add the context your candidates need to decide if they’re a fit or not. More context = better candidate experience.

If you like seeing content like this, go ahead and give a few claps to let us know to keep making it.

Check out Ruutly.com to learn how to transform text-based job descriptions into fully-branded, candidate experiences.

The Secret Formula to Better Job Descriptions. was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When we started down the path of launching Ruutly, we spent quite a bit of time talking with the industry experts we believed could offer insights that we may have otherwise overlooked.

We made a list of people we thought would be a match. Then, we dove in and ate up all of the content we could find from the people on our list. We watched the panel discussions, listened to the podcasts, read the tweets, gobbled up the blogs and then reached out directly.

We were blown away by the openness and genuine willingness to help. As we went through our list, we ended every conversation with the question, “is there anybody else you think we should be connecting with?” and I kid you not, 80% of our list answered, “William Tincup”.

By the time we set up a call with him, we’d heard his name so much, it felt like a meeting with the Oracle.

We talked about the industry and then we demoed Ruutly. William asked some great questions, gave some great advice and then finished the call by imparting this:

I totally get what you guys are working on. Ruutly is the last mile of candidate experience.

We finished up the chat and it wasn’t until after our conversation I realized just how accurate that statement was.

Now I understand why everybody told us we needed to connect with him. There was so much truth in the way William framed his understanding of Ruutly.

How many companies spend thousands of dollars of their Talent Acquisition budgets on launching new, beautiful career pages? How many companies pour money into job posting credits? How many companies make sure their ATS is current and providing a solid application process? How many are making sure their HRIS is making on-boarding and the post-hire process enjoyable?

And how many of those same companies are copying and pasting their job postings from a template that somebody wrote years ago? Or using purely (and usually poorly-formatted) text job postings?

How many companies are completely overlooking, flat-out ignoring, or simply don’t know the best practices when it comes to candidate experience in job postings?

Because here’s the deal, if you’re spending money on job ads on LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Indeed or any other job posting site, candidates aren’t seeing your beautiful career site. They aren’t learning about your benefits. They don’t get to see the diverse workforce and brilliant culture that your company is building. They are either a) applying directly through the 3rd party site or b) landing directly on the corresponding job posting. And chances are, that posting is completely void of your employer brand.

It’s 2018 and for some reason, job postings look and feel like they’re stuck in the 1990’s.

There’s a massive opportunity for you to use your job postings to tell your brand story. Companies like Cactus Club get this. I mean just look at their job postings. Companies like T-Mobile are using their job postings to blow candidates away and give them the info that they may otherwise not see if they’re landing directly on a job posting. See for yourself! And Diply (full disclosure: Diply is a customer of Ruutly) uses their job postings to show their personality and share their story in every single posting. Here’s an example.

And if you’re using a modern ATS with an accessible API, making these changes to your job postings doesn’t take a lot of effort, time or money. It doesn’t require any fancy software. It requires you to take an audit of your job postings and then identify what kind of experience you want candidates to have and what story you want to tell.

Your company is undoubtedly doing so many things right in the Talent Acquisition department. But are you skipping the last mile of candidate experience and celebrating a bit too early?

Are your job postings matching the expectations your candidates have as consumers? Are your job postings giving candidates the information and the experience they need to make a truly-informed decision of whether the role and your company are a fit?

You’ve run 99% of the race and you owe it to your candidates and your team to complete the last mile, because that’s where you’ll find the greatest opportunity to delight your candidates, attract the best talent and stand out from other companies kicking their feet up 100m from the finish line.

If you like what you’ve just read, go ahead and clap a few times for us to let us know that you enjoy content like this. And if you have any questions for me, head over to Ruutly.com and chat with us.

The Final Mile of Candidate Experience — The Job Posting was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Imagine running a marathon and getting to the end just to find out that you missed out on 264m of the marathon and were disqualified.

The Marathon of the North isn’t an isolated case either. Google tells me this is a pretty common thing. How is this possible? There’s a route. There are marshals. There are markers. There are random people handing out refreshments along the course and sometimes there are even dogs handing out high fives.

It’s possible because humans are humans. They take wrong turns. They look too far ahead or they look down for too long. They get distracted. And sometimes, they’re lead there by mis-marked trails or misinformed marshals.

The point is, they don’t always take the path that’s been designed for them to take.

We spend quite a bit of our time looking at what companies are doing when it comes to employer branding in the application process. More specifically, we look at how companies are telling their brand story through the pre-apply portion of the process.

And companies are doing some incredible things.

I mean, take a look at the career pages of your favorite brands. They’re amazing! Beautiful images and videos. Culture pages filled with smiling faces of real employees sharing their stories. Laundry lists of wonderful benefits and values.

And from there, once a candidate has learned more about the company, they can click into the job descriptions they’re interested in and move along in the application process, eventually ending up at the finish line and submitting their application.

This is the marked course.

The trouble is, this isn’t the course that candidates always take.

The truth is, there are no rules to how candidates discover your job descriptions.

Your data will tell your story but I’ll wager a bet that a significant number of candidates are not flowing through your careers page. In fact, I’m guessing your data says that the majority of your candidates don’t flow through your branded career page. Instead, they’re landing on a job description from a LinkedIn update, an email or a job board posting.

And those candidates are missing out on all of that goodness that you’re likely pouring into your careers page. They’re missing those smiling faces, those value statements, those videos, the list of benefits and the testimonials of other employees. They’re missing out on your employer brand and your employer value proposition altogether.

Imagine your careers page doesn’t exist. Imagine that the only thing a candidate sees is an update on LinkedIn and then an actual job description. What story are you telling? What impression are you giving?

If you’ve read our past posts, you’re probably sick of hearing us talk about the importance of job descriptions. But the fact of the matter is this: the job description is the base unit of measurement of your talent acquisition strategy. And right now, most companies are coming up 264m short.

Here’s a challenge for you: take a quick inventory of the brands you’re wearing today. Choose one of those brands and navigate to their careers page. Take an inventory of what you see and experience there. Take inventory of the emotions and feelings the page evokes.

Then, I want you to click into an actual job description. Did something happen? Did that brand story disappear? Did those stories melt away? Did the video of Janessa talking about why she loves working as a developer for that company vanish in a job description for a developer role? Is there some way for you to experience those same things from the career site in the job description? Or do you have to click away from the job description to have that experience?

You can’t control the way that candidates land in job descriptions but you can definitely make sure they have a great experience when they arrive.

Candidates crave experience in job descriptions. They crave clarity about the role and they crave transparency about the company and most companies fail to offer any of the above, beyond a standard job description.

I’ve written about it before and I’ve even spoke about it on various stages but there are things you can be doing immediately to improve the experience candidates have in your job descriptions. There are things you can be doing immediately to tell your brand story and sharing with candidates all of the reasons they might fall in love with your brand.

By excluding your employer brand from your descriptions, you’re missing the chance to truly impress your candidates and you’re actually making it more difficult for them to finish the race.

Like what you read? Hit the applause button to let us know that you want more content like this.

Your Career Site Doesn’t Exist. was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Really. You should pack your bags and head to your underground fallout bunker because it’s all over.

…Or at least that’s the conclusion people would come to if they believed what was being regurgitated at HR events, going viral on LinkedIn and being written about on HR blogs.

I get it. The world lives for shock value (I mean look at the title of the article you’re reading right now!), so saying things like “recruiting is dead” or “job boards are dead” gets clicks and somehow makes people feel like they know what they’re talking about. Or maybe it even makes the person saying it feel like a “thought-leader”, “influencer”, “revolutionary” or “contrarian”.

The only thing that’s dead, is the people saying everything is dead. They’re the zombies flocking to flashy, short-term tech and outspoken, self-proclaimed thought-leaders like fresh flesh in a post-apocalyptic world.

Instead of claiming that “everything is dead” and that we’re all helmet-deep in a “war for talent” (a different blog post for a different day), it’s time that the doomsday talent acquisition professionals take off their gas masks, drop the nailgun and realize that the talent acquisition world isn’t a barren wasteland occupied by brain-eating zombies, mummified technology and expired techniques. Rather, it’s a living, breathing industry that’s evolving, maturing and adjusting to the world around it. And that maybe, just maybe, the people claiming these things are dead, simply haven’t adjusted their strategies to accommodate the changes needed to stay relevant.

“The present moment dies every moment to become the past, is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.”
~Deepak Chopra

There are a ton of things I’ve heard echoing in the halls of Talent Acquisition events but in this post I want to focus on three things in particular that are being proclaimed dead but are very much alive and well.

Recruiting is Dead

I recently read a blog post proclaiming that “recruitment is dead”. One argument that was being used as a basis for that assessment? The author wasn’t being recruited on LinkedIn.

That’s like me claiming that marriage is dead because I’m not getting any marriage proposals on Tinder.

LinkedIn is a single tool in the recruiter toolkit. Yes, some recruiters use LinkedIn almost exclusively. Yes, there are some horrible, lazy, borderline criminal, recruiters out there. But there are also extremely talented, empathetic, successful recruiters doing incredible things for their employers and clients.

One of the more recent arguments that’s surfacing at HR events and online is: recruiting is dead because of AI… or big data… or bots… or machine learning… or propensity algorithms… Or all, at the same time.

At a recent HR event, I was watching a panel discuss the future of Talent Acquisition and the panel was asked, “what does the future have in store for talent acquisition”. And one of the panelists jumped in immediately, “all I’m going to say is AI & bots. A…I… And… Bots.” #micdrop?

Like that’s literally the only thing in the future of Talent Acquisition.

Big data, AI, machine learning, propensity algorithms and chatbots. Yes, they all have a place in Talent Acquisition. But at some point, the process requires a human. Remember, Human Resources.

Sidenote: Remember when Siri used to serve up a list of the nearest bridges when a user told her that they wanted to jump off of a bridge? Luckily, humans intervened and reprogrammed her to give info on suicide prevention hotlines.

Technology is definitely part of the answer and will replace some of the pieces traditionally done by humans but the human elements of recruiting will become that much more important. And while the technology will become increasingly critical to the recruiting process, that technology will be utilized to augment the recruiting process and empower recruiters, not replace them.

The invention of the car didn’t kill the transportation industry, it transformed it from a slow, slightly inconvenient, pretty smelly experience into something much faster, convenient and less crappy (literally).

So how do we breathe life back into recruiting? Focus on the parts that are most human and figure out how to make those parts much better. Use technology to support the elements of recruiting that humans have been empirically poor at and double-down on the elements that require a human touch.

Look at companies like Shopify, Kinaxis, Klick Health, Hootsuite and Johnson & Johnson. How is it that these companies are able to recruit great talent over and over? They’ve figured out what works and are doing an incredible job getting the people they need. My bet is that if you asked any of the recruiters about the current state of recruiting, they would tell you it’s alive and well.

Job Boards are Dead

Last month Glassdoor released a report on some of their successes. And while there were some interesting findings, there were two numbers in particular that lend to the argument that job boards are not dead.

1. Glassdoor has been growing on average 28% per month since January.
2. An applicant applying through Glassdoor is 2x as likely to be hired.

So it’s not that job boards are dead, it’s that the candidate expectation of what a job board should be has evolved. The data shows that job board traffic is trending downwards. Does this mean that they’re all dead? Not at all. It means that the companies posting to them are failing to do so in a way that sparks interest or garners attention.

Or it means that traditional, big-player job boards are failing.

The decline of job boards may be because they are saturated with postings that are being scraped instead of natively posted. In many cases, this introduces an extra step for the candidate as when they click the “apply” button on the scraped posting. As a result, they’re redirected to the original source of the posting to vie the exact same posting and click “apply” again.

Would you not also stop visiting job boards if they were actually adding an unnecessary, mostly underwhelming step to the process?

Sidenote: just because your career site is being scraped by a job posting aggregator doesn’t mean you’re using a job board. Just like being strapped to the mast of a sailboat doesn’t mean you’re now a sailor:

So how do we breathe new life into job boards?
I would argue that Google jobs is doing just that. I would argue that Glassdoor has been doing just that. I would argue that job boards like Dice are doing just that.

Raising the quality of the posting is critical. Following Glassdoor’s lead and offering more than poorly formatted, million-bulleted, scraped job postings is the new standard.

Job boards can be ridiculously effective if a recruiting team takes time to ID where their ideal candidates are going to search for jobs and then optimize for those candidates and those sources.

Job Postings are Dead

In a recent sales meeting with a major employer, the talent acquisition lead actually told me that she didn’t care if candidates read her job postings because she believed they are interfering with the application process and said that “people don’t even pay attention to them anyway”.

She proclaimed that job postings were dead.

Nope. Not the case.

Her job postings were most definitely dead, or at least in need of major resuscitation, but job postings as a whole are becoming more important than ever.

Job postings are one of the most effective ways to weed out the poor-fit candidates and attract the great-fits.

Job postings give an opportunity to tell a brand story, give context to the industry, company and role that you’re hiring for.

Job postings are meant to be an extension of your career page, social networks and employer brand. They’re meant to give crucial insight to the candidates. Especially when you’re not sure how people are arriving on your postings, it’s so important to include your brand story front and centre.

So how do we breathe new life into job descriptions? By giving candidates what they want. By turning job postings into experiences. By writing highly contextualized descriptions that align with the candidate’s consumer expectations. By introducing branding, video and whatever else it takes to show candidates the type of company they’re applying for and how they match up.

Need a place to start? Look at how AT&T is building their job postings into full-blown experiences that are a complete extension of their brand and completely aligned with consumer/candidate expectations.

Claiming that everything is dead is easy. What’s hard is revising your talent acquisition strategy to evolve with the needs of your candidates, industry and organization. The hard pill to swallow is that usually, the things that you’re claiming are dead, are the biggest gaps in your talent acquisition strategy or toolkit.

Yes, social is extremely important. Yes, inbound is massively critical to a talent acquisition strategy. Yes, mobile is a necessity. But keeping up with the evolution of tenured talent acquisition sources is equally as important.

There’s undoubtedly a need for massive change across many talent acquisition tools and functions but a need for change most certainly doesn’t equate to those things being dead. If that was the case, then we might as well give up now.

Next time you hear somebody declare that something in the world of talent acquisition is dead, ask yourself if the person making the declaration a true visionary or simply a zombie looking for a brain to eat.

Talent acquisition is dead. You’re a zombie. The world is over. was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On a recent speaking tour, from my room in an Elvis-themed hotel in Memphis, an AT&T commercial on the TV caught my attention. Mostly because it was starring Mark Whalberg (who is one of my favorite actors) but also because it was really, really well done.

Every time I see a brand doing something really well on the consumer-facing marketing front, my mind immediately jumps to the question of how well they’re doing on their candidate-facing marketing efforts and candidate experience.

I immediately opened up a new tab in Chrome and fired up the AT&T career site. And today, I want to share with you what I found.

First Stop: The Careers Page.

The first thing to notice isn’t even on the actual careers page. It’s in the URL bar. The location of AT&T’s career page is: http://att.jobs/.

Far too many companies use their default ATS-hosted sites for their job postings without thinking about the implications. Having your career site hosted on www.yourATS.com/boards/your_company does nothing for your company page in terms of SEO. The positions you’re hiring for are not being indexed as part of your company’s site and instead is donating that SEO to your ATS. This means if somebody was to search for a specific role within your company, your ATS will show up on Google before your company’s site does.

In most cases, it requires such little effort and tech to point your career site and job postings to your own site and the payoff is well worth it in the long-term SEO game.

Moving along to the actual site.

First impression of the design? 2012. Which isn’t a bad thing, it just totally reminds me of the Windows 8 Metro UI.

A quick search on the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine confirms my thought. A screenshot of AT&T’s career site was indexed on December 21, 2013 and it shows a nearly identical career site to its current site.

Again, it’s not a bad thing. It simply hasn’t been overhauled in the last few years.

While the design is decent, I would argue that it’s difficult to create a hierarchy using this kind of design. There’s no clear call-to-action when all CTAs are given the same treatment. And when candidates land on a career site, they need to understand the next logical step or at least find it easy to uncover what they’re there for.

Let’s click into one of these tiles. Personally, I’d like to learn more about Life at AT&T.

This is an example of where this kind of tiled design makes for a positive candidate experience: content delivery. In this case, there’s no real hierarchy needed, it’s a free-for-all, choose-your-own-adventure, what-do-you-want-to-know experience. Candidates are free to choose the areas they are most interested in.

Scrolling down, we find a tile called “The #1 Thing You Need To Know About Working At AT&T”. Clicking on that tile brings up a non-tiled menu page. The page is instead, filled with the faces of real AT&T people doing real things.

Clicking through the other tiles from the Life at AT&T menu, I was more and more impressed by the sheer volume and quality of each section. I found social media feeds, video stories, diversity and inclusion statements and stories, lists of benefits, conference info and highlights from service days.

AT&T does an incredible job of covering all of their bases by providing a ton of options for candidates to learn about life at AT&T. They go far above and beyond what we typically see from other companies.

Career Site Design Score: 2.5/5

While the design isn’t horrible, it’s a bit dated. The main career site could definitely do a better job of establishing a hierarchy and presenting it in a way that guides a candidate through the experience.

Career Site Candidate Experience: 3.5/5

There are so many opportunities for candidates to learn about AT&T, their values, their benefits and what life is like working for them. Everything is organized and easy to find. There are very few companies who provide this much content in a way that’s engaging and in a way that candidates can easily understand and access. AT&T does it nearly perfectly.

JOB POSTINGS

Now this is obviously what we live and breathe at Ruutly, so I was excited to dive into AT&T’s postings. I had medium-level expectations based on what I saw from their career site. I was definitely not expecting what I found.

At first glance, it looks good. A giant image of a happy person, a clear title, a clearly displayed location. And then, what’s this? A navigation bar in a job posting? A way for candidates to actually navigate to particular pieces of a job posting that they may be interested in?

This moved my expectations up a level.

Let’s scroll.

Motherfather. This is amazing.

A clear profile of schedule expectations and… a dollar sign…? Followed by actual numbers? This can’t even be possible. Am I seeing a salary IN A JOB POSTING?

I am! 👏👏 ← And that’s only because there’s no standing ovation emoji.

Candidates expect salary in job descriptions. Google it. Yet so few companies give any indication of what a job might pay. I promise you, if you’re not disclosing a salary or salary range, you’re losing out on great people who would otherwise apply.

Just below to key info about this position, we see a bar graph with a success profile. A visual indicator of the type of skills a candidate should have to be successful in this role.

My only criticism here would be that the skills are really generic. If you’ve read some of our other teardowns or Jahmal’s recent post, we’re bullies when it comes to including context in a posting. “Communicator” means very little if it’s not accompanied by what that means to this particular role in this particular company.

This is going much better than I could’ve imagined. Let’s keep scrolling.

Do you know what I love about this AT&T posting? It’s a true experience. And the job description is only a piece of the experience. So many companies simply call their postings “job descriptions” because that’s all they are. A text-based description of the role. No more, no less.

The actual description isn’t bad. It starts with, what I would argue is the most critical info about the Bilingual Spanish Part Time Retail Sales Consultant, the two languages you must be able to speak for this role.

They go on to describe the role, typical earnings for people in that role, benefits and some great perks.

Again, if I get out my nit-picker, I’d push for more context around some of the skills. “Do you like helping people?” — helping people with what? Firefighters help people. Personal assistants help people. Bodyguards help people. Crossing guards help people but they all help them in different ways. “Do you like technology?” — What kind of tech? My dad likes motorcycle tech. My brother likes airsoft tech. One of our staff here at Ruutly likes music tech, it doesn’t mean they’d all be perfect for this role.

Let’s scroll.

Ok AT&T, stop it. You’re making this very hard for other companies to compete.

First, we have a video, highlighting retail jobs at AT&T. And then we have something nearly unheard of… a clear, step-by-step guide of the application process.

This is what great candidate experience looks like.

Candidate experience doesn’t start once an applicant clicks “apply”, it starts on the careers page, or on your social media feed or in a job posting, or any other place a candidate may land to learn more about life at AT&T and AT&T clearly understands that.

Let’s scroll.

They follow up their video and little application checklist with an in-depth look at what the total process looks like from the online application all the way through to being hired. They also have a section to help their applicants prepare for the assessments they’re required to take.

There are no curveballs, no unknowns, no email abysses where a candidate needs to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes. They know exactly what’s happening and what the process entails.

Can I repeat myself? This is what great candidate experience looks like.

This is AT&T showing complete empathy for their candidates and setting crystal clear expectations.

Surely there’s nothing else to be seen. But just to make sure, let’s scroll.

Shut. The. Front. Door.

How many candidates discount entry-level roles and wonder where those jobs could lead? How many of those candidates never apply because they seem like “just” a job and not the launchpad for a meaningful, successful career?

AT&T shows the career paths that retail could lead to. They don’t discount the impact a candidate could have on their company. They don’t cap the success of an entry-level employee and in turn, empower their candidates to imagine a life-long, successful career with the company.

This is what great candidate experience looks like.

Let’s scroll.

AT&T caps the experience off with some info on benefits and then another video outlining the role.

All really well done.

Job Posting Design: 4/5

Job Description Clarity: 3/5

Job Posting Candidate Experience: 5/5

Conclusion

There are so many opportunities to create an actual experience through a career site and most importantly, through actual job postings. But so often, companies completely abandon candidates in job postings and leave them underwhelmed with generic descriptions, design and experience.

While their main career page could use a design update and clearer navigation, AT&T is out to show the world that job postings can be an actual experience. They clearly show that the actual job description is just one part of the experience and that candidates deserve empathy, excitement and empowerment.

We spend a lot of our time looking at career pages and job postings. And while we’ve had some great examples of great career sites and job posting design, we have yet to see anything like the actual experience that AT&T provides.

I’m asked daily, “so who does candidate experience in postings really well” and from now on, I won’t let the question-asker finish. AT&T does. AT&T does candidate experience in postings really, really well.

Final thought: AT&T doesn’t have an unfair advantage. The main ingredient to a great candidate experience isn’t budget or brains, it’s empathy for the candidate and a desire to give them the type experience they deserve.

So, thank you Mark Whalberg.

FINAL SCORE: 18/25

Job Posting Teardown: AT&T was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the things that surprises me as I work through the queue of companies for this job posting teardown series is just how many companies get things right… and more surprising is how many of them are somewhat unknown outside of their industries.

I first heard about Instructure about five years ago at SXSWedu. We’ve kept our eye on them and have a lot of respect for the work they’re doing in with the candidate experience in their careers page and job postings.

So while you may not have heard of them, it’s no coincidence that an ed-tech company is schooling the world on how things should be done.

(make sure to view at fullscreen for the best experience)

(This series was inspired by Samuel over at UserOnBoard.com)

Our goal is never to offend the people who put time, work and effort into the job postings we look at but we hope to start a discussion, offer suggestions, create a more compelling candidate experience and give a nod to the companies getting it right.

Let me know your thoughts and if you like what we’re doing, hit the heart beside or under this post to show some love.

Head to Ruutly.com to learn how we’re helping.

Job Posting Teardown: Instructure was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I want you to imagine you were a fly on the wall of the design lab when the Apple industrial design team was going over the concepts for the original iPhone.

I want you to imagine the painstaking attention paid to the smallest details. The obsession that took over the team as they looked at the shapes, contours, weights, colors, materials, buttons and screens.

Can you imagine the debates that took place about the tiniest decisions? Can you also imagine the impact that those decisions ultimately had?

The iPhone was a category-defining success because Apple never lost sight of their goal to create something revolutionary for their consumers.

In fact, Christopher Stringer, a member of Apple’s industrial design team told us exactly what the goal was with the iPhone, “We were looking for a new, original and beautiful update, something that would wow the world.”

The iPhone won because Apple was laser-focused, hyper-obsessed, with the consumer and delivering the best product they could imagine. The result? they wowed the world.

So what?

Your candidates are consumers. That’s what.

They’re consumers before, during and after their experience with your company as a candidate. They’re used to companies like Apple, Samsung, Nike, Starbucks, Johnson & Johnson, Google, LG, FitBit and Beats by Dre relentlessly focusing on creating the most delightful user experiences possible.

They browse career sites on unibody aluminum smartphones, retina displays and 32”, 4K curved desktop monitors. They understand what great user experience is. They inherently have expectations for everything they touch, swipe, tap and click.

And that’s why they hate job postings.

They hate job postings because they’re not designed, written or engineered for a consumer. Instead, they are copy-and-pasted together almost exclusively with the company in mind. The skills and requirements are worded and ordered in a way that makes sense to the recruiter, the content is placed in a way that satisfies the Talent Acquisition team and the application process approved and implemented by HR.

They hate job postings because they don’t even know how to approach them. There’s zero user-experience. There’s very limited design. We’ve seen job postings without punctuation, written in all caps, using three different fonts.

When was the last time a Talent Acquisition team obsessed over the design of a job posting, the positioning of its elements or the wording of its content? When was the last time a recruiter sweat the small stuff in their job postings? Not for the company but for the sake of the candidate’s experience?

When was the last time a company user-tested their job postings to understand how consumers interact with them? When was the last time a company set the lofty goal to wow the world with their job postings?

For your company to start crafting job postings that wow the world, you must begin approaching your candidates as consumers first. Why? Because they are. Period.

In my next post(s), I’ll look at 3 ways to start approaching your job-postings with consumer-centric focus.

If you like what you’re reading, click the heart on the side or bottom of this post or click follow to make sure you never miss content like this.

Want to know more about what we’re doing to help companies dramatically improve candidate experience and employer branding in their job postings? Head to Ruutly.com.

Your Candidates are Consumers. Period. was originally published in Ruutly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.