Three quick tips for a well-written job description—based on today’s hiring data

Writing an exceptional job description is critical for filling a role. You need to ensure that you immediately capture someone’s attention when they see your job listing. Job posts aren’t just confined to your careers page —they travel. Job listings end up on numerous careers sites and can take on various unintended formats. These three tips will help you capture a candidate’s attention, no matter where someone is reading your job post.

We’ve spent a lot of time on this blog writing about how language change can affect the performance of your job listing. And while language is incredibly important for a well written job post, so is job description formatting. And much like the most powerful language in job posts, the most effective formatting patterns will change over time. The three tips below, are based on what is impacting job listing performance right now.

1. Build your bullets—carefully

Nothing changes an initial impression of a job listing more than its visual layout. One of the biggest factors of visual layout is bulleted content. On the whole, Textio’s predictive engine currently shows that the best listings contain about one-third bulleted content. If you have too many bullets, you’ll tend to turn off women, too few and you’ll turn off men.

2. Job posts in 140 characters? Not so fast

Have you tried tweetable job posts? Well, this idea is taking the “shorter is better” trend a little too far, but data does show that job listings that are overly-long cause a statistically significant drop off in the number of applicants. That said, if they’re too short, you don’t have enough meat to engage people.

3. Sentence length is significant

How long is the average English sentence? No surprise; it varies. For website copy you might choose 25 words per sentence, but if you’re writing a billboard advertisement it is six words or less. Job posts fall somewhere in the middle.

Time is not on your side

Keep in mind that these tips are based on data that shows what’s performing well right now. In fact, Textio has found that within the last twelve months, the highest performing job posts have gotten even shorter, and so has the optimal sentence length. Job seekers react better to shorter sentences now than they did at the beginning of 2016. Only with a predictive engine that is constantly learning from 10 million job posts per month can you conclusively say how applicants will react to a listing in today’s market. Smart recruiters know how to stay on trend.