Dive Brief:
- Job listings that garner clicks but no applicants may focus more on personality than “specific, checkable expertise,” leaving candidates uncertain what the roles will actually require of them, according to new research from employment platform JobLeads.
- While zero-apply postings tend to list similar median salaries and skill requirements, they are more likely to feature words such as “motivated,” “hardworking” and “following directions.” Jobs in HR are 28% more likely “to be clicked but not applied to” than the baseline, and finance roles are 25% less likely.
- When prospective employees don’t feel engaged by a generic job posting, they may be more likely to abandon their application. In a slow job market where applicants may apply to as many as 90 roles before being hired, per a recent Indeed study, burnout and exhaustion could cause promising candidates to look elsewhere for opportunities.
Dive Insight:
The JobLeads study examined nearly 1.4 million U.S. job postings between April and June, and concluded that “a posting that reads like a template will be treated like one.”
For applicants, the issue is straightforward.
“A job seeker can check whether they know Python or have run a payroll cycle,” the report said. “They can’t check whether they are ‘motivated’ enough — that’s the difference between hard and soft skills. These phrases give readers nothing to measure themselves against, and they tend to appear in postings that feel templated rather than written for a specific role.”
As a result, applicants might read a job post and decide not to apply based solely on whether or not they felt like they belonged at that company, rather than whether they felt they had the right skill set.
“This suggests the problem isn’t that the bar is too high,” the report said. “It’s that there’s no visible bar at all.” The report added that for job seekers, “vague, trait-heavy wording is one of the more common red flags in job postings.”
In addition, the report found that job postings that focused on what kind of equipment an applicant needed to own tended to do poorly. Using words such as “laptop”, “computer” or “smartphone” speak very little to role requirements, and may also suggest to applicants that a company doesn’t plan to provide basic work equipment.
Meanwhile, listing specific job requirements may help applicants check their own skill sets for gaps before applying for a role. This could help eliminate the glut of unqualified applicants that can sometimes slow down the hiring process.
The report said it was ironic that HR jobs were the most likely to get no applicants, since HR “is the function most often responsible for writing job ads.” However, one likely reason for the disconnect could be that HR roles depend on criteria such as culture fit and lean heavily on soft skills, so they are “described in the soft, trait-led language that over-indexes across the dataset,” the report said.
Overall, organizations that want to write better job postings need to focus on details.
“Name the skills the role actually uses, the systems a new hire will work in, and what success looks like in the first few months,” the report said.
A recent report from hiring technology firm Employ, Inc. found that job application processes should also be efficient. The study found that 71% of U.S. respondents expect a job application to take less than 30 minutes to complete, and 35% will abandon the process if it ends up taking too long.
