|
|
|
|
|
The Job Hunt |
|
Author: Staff Editor's Note: The annual fall recruitment season is upon us and over the next 120 days we'll see more jobs listed than we will during the entire rest of the year. While this column is normally devoted to the employee side of the job hunt equation, this month we are turning our attention to the employers among our readers. This article will focus on tips to get your open job the notice it deserves - from the kind of employee you want to hire. Today's STEM employment market has the kind of problems other market segments could only wish for. Today's graduates are well qualified for these open positions and anxious to find their next job. The question for employers is how to get candidates to notice their openings and how to encourage them to apply. The "apply now" button isn't sufficient to attract the candidate you really want. At the same time, finding the candidate who fits well into your organization and is going to stay for a reasonable amount of time is even more important today than it was a decade ago. Today's applicants have different motivations than those of a decade ago. Today's newly minted graduates look a lot like mid-career graduates of a decade ago when you consider what motivates them to seriously look at an open position. After the great recession and the Covid years, applicants of all ages value job stability, room for growth within the organization, and the feeling that their value is appreciated by their employer. Two years ago the EpiMonitor surveyed its readers to see what was most important to them when evaluating job opportunities. The most important issues were, as expected, salary and benefits. But there were other key points that surfaced as being extremely important to today's job searcher. To make your job listing more attractive you should consider highlight at least some of these in your job listings: A. Job opportunities / job search support for partners B. Quality ranking of the local K-12 school systems C. Local tax picture (both property & income) D. Local housing prices and availability E. Length of commute - housing picture near your organization F. Time off / flexibility (more about this later) G. Recreational opportunities in your area H. A sense of the local community J. Tuition reimbursement / PSLF eligibility In some ways, looking for a job is like looking for a house - there are a lot of them available but finding the right one takes good marketing by the seller. Pictures help a lot and your local Chamber of Commerce may be able to provide you with a couple that you can use in your ad. They should be evocative of your local community so that at a glance the searcher will say "that looks like a place I'd feel comfortable." A good realtor can normaly guide you to information about the local school system. While you don't want to include more than a brief paragraph about it in your ad, you should be able to include a link to more detailed information for the applicant to whom this is important. One place you shouldn't skip, because it will be important to all applicants, is a list of benefits. You won't be able to include all of them but a bulletized list will draw the reader's eye and will help them easily compare & contrast your opening to others on the market. Make sure you include contact information wherever possible. People don't feel valued when the only point of contact that you provide is a form that sends their information into a black hole. As important as it is to attract applicants, attracting the right applicant is even more important. It is expensive to recruit & onboard new hires and you want to find an applicant who is a good fit so they'll stick around. Employers today are complaining about culture shock when hiring. The value applicants place on personal time and daily schedules is frustrating to older hiring managers who came up in a different cultural environment. Your ad needs to provide sufficient information that it attracts the type of applicant who will be a good fit. Your interview process is going to surface information about their future plans and their prior job history but you want to tailor your ad so the people you interview are the ones who will really fit. One of the things we notice is employers who have multiple simultaneous job openings and make that clear in their ad will attract more attention than those who appear to have a single opening. For example a job listing that says "Multiple Faculty Positions" or "2 Research Scientists" will get many more clicks than job ads without the "Multiple" or "2" in the header even if the text of the ad indicates that there are multiple openings. How you lay your text out is equally important. Endless paragraphs of dense text is much less likely to attract an applicant than ads with clear lists that uses bolding, italics, and color to draw the reader's eye to the things you want them to notice. This combined with a few color images can draw the reader's eye through your ad and ensure that they see all the important points you wanted to highlight. After a brutal 12 months in this market segment, it appears that fall 2026 is going to be a robust job market. That means you'll have a lot of competition for the same applicants. Advertising is expensive and following these tips will help you compete on a solid footing. Need help building your ad? Contact our office and we'll work with you to craft a winning solicitation. Michele Gibson / 770.309.7937 / michele@epimonitor.net ■ |
|
|
