How to Write a Job Posting

Whether it’s an old or new job requisition on file, recruiters have to find the perfect balance of skills to attract the candidates they want. That’s why talent-seekers should know how to write a job posting that will appeal to the right audience. 

How do you know which skills to include in your job posting? Which skills will make your pool too broad? Too narrow? Too expensive? It’s nearly impossible to know without data.

We know some of you are having a hard time hiring right now and we want to help as much as we can! We’ve created a free tool to help you effectively optimize your job posting and hiring efforts.

The most common job posting mistake

Job postings are often written by managers because (they think) they know what to search for in a new hire. The posting then gets handed to Human Resources for fulfillment. The problem with that process? It doesn’t include analyzing the skills within the posting.

Think about it. Hiring managers have no way of knowing what kind of talent exists in the market or how the skills they’re asking for impact the pool of potential candidates. This is where skills analysis can help by offering insights and providing suggestions to optimize job postings.

How to write a job posting with these 6 tips: 

1. Understand the skills you’re asking for.

2. Pick the best job title.

3. Understand the profile availability for your posting.

4. Know your competition.

5. Understand the diversity of your talent pool.

6. Find out where the talent you want is located.

Let’s dive into each of these tips a bit further.

1. Understand the skills you’re asking for.

Copy the text of your posting into our Job Posting Optimizer and watch it instantly extract all the skills you’re listing (including ones you didn’t realize you were asking for). Now you can refine the posting by taking note of which skills are common, which are priorities, and which you can exclude. Best of all, it’s FREE for up to 10 uses!

2. Pick the best job title.

How much thought is put into a job title before posting for it? Typically, not much.

Job titles aren’t always reflective of the skills or duties you’re asking for in a posting. So how do you know which title to choose? By putting data to work. Now you can get job title suggestions based on the details of your posting, without having to do extra research.

Let’s look at a “software developer” posting as an example. After pasting the job description into this tool, suggested job titles populate based on the details of the posting. In this case, it looks like “back end engineer” is actually a more fitting title for this position, given the skills within the posting. 

3. Understand the profile availability for your posting (and how that changes depending on the skills you ask for).

You can analyze that same posting further by typing in a specific region you’re interested in. Let’s use the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara region for example. Notice that the number of profiles in that region will change according to the specific skills filtered.

4. Know your competition.

A great way to gain insights into how you can craft job postings is by looking at your competition. By looking at real-time job postings you can see who your competition is, how often they’re posting, and at what price. This information allows you to quickly determine how you stack up against your competition, and which recruiting challenges you might face if you don’t keep up. 

5. Understand the diversity of your talent pool.

Employers continue to place great value in diversity-based hiring initiatives. So how do you get age, race, gender, and more information for one position in a single market? You guessed it, data. 

By looking at aggregate profile data, you can understand the age demographic of the talent you’re needing to attract along with the average racial and gender diversity of a given job title. This information helps you make informed decisions about which website you should advertise your job posting on, and other recruiting strategies that would appeal to different audiences. 

6. Find out where the talent you want is located (and advertise to them accordingly).

Similar to diversity information, location data can be extremely valuable in understanding where and how you should advertise your job posting. In our continued example for back end engineers (previously software developers), we see that a large amount of profiles live and work in different area codes. You may want to consider targeting the top areas in both these categories to gain the most advertising exposure.  

Need more of a visual? We’ve also mapped out occupations and profiles by concentration. Simply hover over any market to see the number of profiles that can be found there.

Stop guessing on how to write a job posting.

With a labor market as tight as ours, there is no time to waste when it comes to writing an effective job posting. We want to make sure you have the resources to do this effectively, so we hope you take advantage of the free Job Posting Optimizer to accomplish tip #1. 

 If you would like to dive deeper into analyzing your postings [tips #2-6], let’s chat about getting you access to our  Skills-Driven Recruiting Analysis! We can provide recommendations and give in-depth insights so that you can focus on doing what you do best: hiring great talent.

Our Job Posting Optimizer is built using Emsi Data and APIs, including our free Skills API. Sign up for access to our Skills library!

Ready to learn more about how skills can help you craft better job postings? Fill out the form below!