What Makes for an Effective Job Posting?
Employers write lots of job postings, and either pay to sponsor them on a website like ZipRecruiter, pay directly for visitors to those job listings pages, or hope for people to find them organically through career pages. In any case, they definitely want to make sure their job descriptions and titles are effective at getting the initial visitor to click on the job, but also at convincing qualified applicants to apply. Because ZipRecruiter is an Applicant Tracking System, we have lots of data on what drives conversion from a simple job page view to a real job application.
It’s worth pointing out that high conversion rate doesn’t mean a well written job post, and low doesn’t mean poorly written. It could also reflect the selection bias of people looking for jobs in those categories. A higher conversion rate might point to more preceding filters in certain groups than others. The only real way to tell the difference is with a controlled experiment, but for now we can certainly describe lots of the differences that we see in our data.
Key takeaways:
- Conversion rates are relatively tightly banded, at a high level, most jobs tend to convert around the same rate
- A large predictor of overall conversion rate is simply the job title
- Including more prerequisites slightly lowers conversion rates
- Hiring managers are essentially ad copywriters. For maximum candidate volume, they should optimize job postings using funnel optimization techniques and testing
Conversion by Industry / Category
The first big split on conversion rates is by industry and category of job. These jobs attract different audiences, and reflect the aggregate behavior of job seekers searching for jobs within that industry.
As before, it’s hard to say why Health Care has aggregate lower conversion rates than Business, but it could be for a multitude of reasons. Let’s dive into the Business category to see if there are insights at a more granular level.
I’m still not seeing anything really telling here. Why is Business Development higher than Business Operations? Is it that Business Development searchers are more choosy than Business Operations searchers, and are more likely to only click on jobs they plan on applying to? Or are those posts more well written?
Looking at just those two categories against one another, and splitting conversion rates out by job title, we can see the aggregate average difference remains, but with more variation by job title. So this isn’t just Compliance Specialists dragging down the conversion rate average, it’s that all job seekers within the Business Development category are more likely to apply.
So for someone that only needs a Business Operations hire, it’s helpful to set expectations that given equal traffic and eyeballs to a Business Development posting, they’re likely to net slightly less actual applications.
Differences in Postings Within One Title
Let’s say that someone’s about to post an Operations Manager job in California. What should they include? What should they exclude? Are there words, phrases, or features that lead to better or worse performance?
An easy feature to parse out is whether a job has a salary included or not.
Now it’s tough to say whether or not having a salary is why conversion rates are higher. It’s possible that the subset of jobs that have salaries simply are more attractive jobs for other reasons. We’ve tried A/B testing this a few times at ZipRecruiter, and often times have confusing results. It seems that sometimes adding salary can help conversion rates, but sometimes if those salaries are below market rate, they can hurt conversion rates as well. Need to do more experimenting here.
How about years of experience?
Ah, now we might have something actually under employers control! It appears to me that the more years of experience required, the lower the overall conversion rate. More prospective employees will self-select themselves out of the application process if they don’t have the requisite experience.
Similarly, setting a higher bar in terms of degree requirements seems to deter some folks from applying as well.
Funnel Optimization
Even if they don’t wear the Marketing hat in their daily work, all hiring managers are doing the basic work of optimizing a Marketing purchase funnel when writing job ads. They want to write a catchy headline, but not too vague as to mislead visitors and cause them to leave immediately. They want to write compelling job description copy, but without being overly rosy in describing a perfect work environment so applicants have a fair understanding of what the actual job will be.
Looking from our vantage point across aggregated data, we can look at what employers are doing currently, and what kinds of results that’s netting them. We try to help employers write better job titles and descriptions, but at the end of the day, we allow them to represent their company as they see fit. If they really get into the optimization game, then they’ll need to do their own individual funnel testing to figure out what works for their business and prospective employees.
