The job market in the US is still recovering from the pandemic.  After hitting a record-high unemployment rate of 15% in 2020, the market is heading back towards the pre-pandemic level of 3%.  As of March, 2021, unemployment was at 6%, still double what it was pre-pandemic.

Why these statistics are important to you right now is that if you're a company hiring, and remember how hard it was to fill a job with the right person before the pandemic hit, you would think that it's a company's market right now, but it's actually the opposite.  Most of the 6% are less qualified candidates for the jobs you are most likely trying to fill.  When the pandemic hit, everyone cinched their belts and stayed exactly where they were.

According to LinkedIn, 70% of the workforce is gainfully employed and not actively job seeking, yet 87% are open to better opportunities.

And as you see the number of applications for your positions swell, most likely it will be with people who aren't the right fit for your jobs.  And that's where looking at retooling your job descriptions comes into play...

Right now, due to the increased volume in applications, you'll need to have a way of screening these folks in or out.  The job description is where you want to screen folks in; strike a resonance with them.  Your job description is not where you want to screen them out with a thousand bullet points.

What you want to do is write love letter job description.  This is a job description that answers five basic questions, but is written to the person you want to hire.  The people who will get excited about this will screen themselves in; they will provide buy in as they think "I can do that" or "this sounds perfect for me!"

This job description approach isn't guesswork; it's been created after analyzing over 50,000 successful hires on our Hiring Automation Platform and identifying the winning approaches used to attract the people they ultimately hired.

The winning job descriptions answered these five questions:

1. Why is this job open and why now?

Pretty self-explanatory.  Give people the lowdown on whether this is a new position, if they're stepping into an old one that someone left or what kind of environment they should be expecting to walk into.

2. What needs to be done?

Again, this is not hard.  Avoid bullet points and explain what this person needs to do for you.

3. What are the most common attributes of your top performers in this area?

Is everyone a ping-pong player (table tennis for our euro friends)?  Is everyone a self-starter, or is this more of a position where you have a group of adaptable people who love to ask questions?  Whatever it is, list it here.

4. How will this person be quantifiably successful?

This is one you almost never see, but how will the person win at this job?  If it's a sales position, do they need to close $400,000 of business a year?  If yes, put it in the job description!  Again, the right person will see it and say "I can do that, no problem!" and that's who you want to apply.

5. What's going to make them excited to get out of bed and show up (whether in person or via zoom) to work everyday?

Does your company excel at community giving?  Culture?  Ideals?  This is your opportunity to sell yourself and your competitive advantages besides benefits and compensation.  What's going to light a spark under your candidates that makes them say "I've got to work there!"

Keep in mind several things, however:

1.  There are no purple unicorns.

It becomes very easy to identify hiring managers in your organization that are looking for nonsensical things.  Like a Java software coder that has AWS experience, monitoring experience, management experience and QA experience for an entry level position.  Sometimes referred to as purple unicorns, that person obviously doesn't exist.

2.  Using this method of profiling your jobs to create love letter job descriptions lets you quantifiably identify when you're wrong.

It's okay to be wrong, we all are at some point.  Many companies offer a salary, get 110 candidates, and they all say no when it comes to compensation on offer.  This process allows you to pinpoint when that's happening.  The good news, is you still have all the information for the 110 candidates if the decision is made to up compensation.

Over the next several weeks, we will be expanding on this concept as we look at embedding video in your job descriptions, using a platform to automate screening to screen candidates both in and out and how you can fit all of these types of best practices into your budget easily.

Fiona F. said:
"I don't know how anyone would survive without HireMojo.  We've saved over $125k in marketing costs; not to mention saving the time of NOT having to do guesswork of where to market our jobs, how much to spend and the thousands of administrative tasks that their Recruiterbot™ takes care of on our behalf."

Click Here to get a free demo of the world's first curated Hiring Automated Platform designed to address the pain points of hiring automating most of the administrative work of the hiring process through Mo, Our AI RecruiterBot™, allowing you and your team to focus on the human parts of hiring.  All at a single, transparent cost well below other ATS offerings from other companies that don't address your pain points.