Job announcements: The dead live on

The job announcement is something like the dinosaur of recruitment, although the prehistoric giants clearly had much severer end. They died out. The job announcement must not be permitted a similar fate. It is particularly relevant for active sourcing, but social recruiting and multiposting can also not do without it.

It has long been predicted that job posting is on its last legs. Despite all the forecasts, this state has not yet been reached. The only thing that has vanished is the classic post-and-pray recruiting tactic. Switching on a job announcement and simply waiting is no longer possible. The job market has changed — and this in the candidate’s favour. Classic online recruitment has subsequently been expanded to include trends such as Active Sourcing or Social Recruiting: directly contacting candidates and recruiting on social networks.

New forms of recruitment

Anyone wanting to succeed on these channels must do a little more than has been done in the past. Take, for example, recruitment on social networks: for companies to attract candidates in the online environment, they must provide content that is perfectly tailored to the target group and can be shared via social media. For example:

• Entries from the trainee blog
• Campaign pages
• Information from the in-house career website
• Recruiting videos
• Pictures from the company
• Live streams

This resembles the Direct Contact of candidates through Xing or LinkedIn, also known as Active Sourcing. Recruiters have to succeed in convincing their targeted talents, as early as the first direct message, they do not want them to end up in the discard pile. In addition, it is necessary to be aware of the mass of job opportunities received by high potentials every day. For example, there should be a brief, highly individual message with references to the talented individual’s CV and a good explanation why the vacancy and candidate match perfectly.

Why job posting is not being phased out

The fact is that recruiting, as it is performed today, is not comparable with the practices of ten to twenty years ago. In view of all the new methods, classic job posting plays only a subordinate role, but one that should not be underestimated. It is definitely not a discontinued model. But neither is it any longer THE main part of recruiting, just one of many mosaic tiles needed to experience success. For example, the job announcement is just one of an entire range of communication elements involved in social recruiting and can ensure a perfect spread across social networks. However, Direct Contact of candidates is also appropriate. Packing a detailed job description into the first moment of contact would rupture the text frame. It is much more elegant to integrate a link to the job announcement in the email, and invite the candidate to read it if interested.

Benefits of job postings

Job postings are indispensable for internet job sites and personal career pages. Logically, neither would function without employment advertising. The importance of the Career Home Page and public career portals is diminishing. The “Recruiting Trends” study by the University of Bamberg indicates that, of the top 1000 companies in Germany, 88.9 percent publish job vacancies on their own company website. Over two thirds of the vacancies are posted on internet job sites, and 41 percent of these vacancies are still occupied. This is not by accident. For classic job posting offers a number of advantages:

• Discoverability: Large job sites can specifically ensure large reach, while specialised sites can ensure the targeting of experts in niche areas.
• Format with high acceptance: Job postings have been around for a long time and are familiar to every candidate.
• Simplicity: Job postings are clear and easy to read.

However, a new recruiting trend has also taken hold here: the multiple interlinking of postings. Placing a job advertisement on only one career portal is usually a lost labour of love, as there are more than 1,500 job sites in Germany alone. Relying on only one partner will mean that many talents will inevitably be overlooked. Multi-posting is more promising in this regard.

Multiple interlinking of postings

Ideally, this can even be done comfortably using the in-house Applicant Management System. Manufacturers of HR software are collaborating with various multiposter websites for this purpose. The only thing users then have to do is, for example, to integrate a tab in the implemented system, and the game is afoot. Just a few clicks makes it possible to publish the same job advertisement on a variety of career platforms. And it gets even better: Candidates responding to a job announcement are also, in advanced systems, automatically entered in the system’s own database. For HR, this means maximum time saving.

Design: Job postings are not just job announcements

But beware: Job postings are not just job announcements. To ensure that a job posting not only comes to the attention of talented individuals but also scores with them, it needs to be up to modern standards in terms of design and layout. Often this is unfortunately not the case. Instead, many employers still present candidates with templates having the charm of a small-print treatise. At the same time, there are now multi-media job announcements with responsive designs that can be displayed on a multitude of portable devices. These templates allow you to integrate videos and images from your own company, thus breathing life into a job announcement. And candidates explicitly indicate that they want such multi-media content. This is particularly the case of the generation who has grown up with the internet. For them, videos and lively clips are not extras, but a must. In the worst case, anyone who does not meet this need risks having applicants bail at the outset. Ultimately, the goal should be to have candidates immediately access all the important information in the announcement. This concerns information about the company, the location and the application process. And then the job announcement as an important element in the recruiting process will quickly return from the dead. Promised!