How to skill-up your job ads and hire the talent you need
TL;DR: The market has never been tougher for recruiters and Heads of TA: but you can break the strain and give yourself an advantage by using skills and market data. This article gives you eight actionable tips you can put in place today.
Everyone wants the same talent
In today’s candidate driven market, Talent Acquisition (TA) teams are under enormous pressure. Businesses are changing faster than ever, jobs and skills fluctuate often, and there’s pressure to simultaneously find great talent, reduce time to hire and deliver stretching diversity, equity and inclusion targets. Oh, and everyone else wants the same talent you do!
Even if you can find the right person, it is becoming more common for the candidate to then get an even better offer (good for them) and to suffer from increased rates of early attrition. You just can’t hire people quickly enough.
While it is no ‘silver bullet’ to the perfect job advert, taking a more skills oriented approach to hiring can help. The below article covers a few ways our customers and network are using skills data and insight to optimise their hiring plans and acquire the capabilities they need to grow their business.
How to skill-up your job ads
1. Redesign your job adverts to be skill-centred. Job ads are often too long and look like a wish list of every possible skill and experience. Instead include a short, considered list of required key skills to make your job both specific and attractive. There is a ‘goldilocks’ level to find, with more than 5-10 key skills likely too many. You want to avoid the list becoming a tick-box exercise which will discourage some applicants.
2. Balance transferable and technical skills. Include both ‘transferable’ skills, like Written Communications and Problem Solving, alongside ‘technical’ skills like Financial Analysis, Python and Technical Writing to build a rounded job profile. Often these transferable skills are overlooked or not specific enough to the type of work performed in the role, creating a gap between applicants and the requirements.
3. Kill the filler and remove unnecessary skills. One of the great benefits of a skills-led approach is that it can attract under-represented groups to apply for jobs they may not have done previously. In a JD, every line added has the potential to make the job more specific but comes with the risk of excluding a potential applicant. You must be intentional and thoughtful about including skills and experiences that are not strictly necessary. Focus on outcomes and the skills that will get you there, and you’ll broaden your talent pool significantly.
4. Challenge the degree. Similarly, does your job really require that degree? Sometimes it is necessary, but often it is a relic of bygone hiring. By including higher education requirements, you significantly shrink your talent pool of people, for example from ethnic minorities. Most companies rightly have stretching targets on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) and removing education can have a profound effect.
5. Include similar roles on your job adverts to encourage people who have done similar jobs to apply. People often think in terms of the experience gained in their current job. They may not appreciate that the skills they have gained may be a strong foundation for the role your advertising. By including a list of 3 top related jobs in the advert, your potential candidates can easily understanding if they might have related skills and be a good fit. To populate this, your hiring managers may have a good view, but if not, you can utilise skills-led role profiles such as those available in the Simply Rightskilling platform.
6. Make it clear you will hire for potential and prove support. Some of the skills you are looking for might be scarce in the market. By including skills that are similar to the one you are looking to acquire, but more readily available, you increase your potential to find candidates who can fill or grow into the role. For example, broad data science skills are relatively more available than specialist deep learning skills. By targeting broader data science skills and building a targeted onboarding programme including upskilling, you can build the right talent as quickly as hiring the perfect match. Skills intelligence tools like Simply enable TA teams to identify these related skills easily and can inform forward planning for actions like launching apprenticeship programmes.
7. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Going to the external market is tough. It’s a war out there, with talent increasingly rare. By ensuring your shiny new skills-led job ads are advertised internally you can find talent who already understands your organisational context. One of main drivers of regretted attrition is a lack of career development and progression opportunities. By being clear on the skills you are looking for and analysing the roles you already have for matching talent, you might find you reduce your overall time to hire. Being conscious of which roles are harder to recruit for means you can make balanced trade-off decisions.
For example it might be easier to source an internal hire for a hard to fill role, and in turn backfill their previous position. These modern internal mobility strategies rely on data and insight, with tools like Simply helping reduce time to hire by informing these trade-off decisions at the start of the process. Check out how Simply helps.
8. Challenge the desire for 100% fit. It used to be you could wait for the perfect person to come along. Hiring managers are often looking for that perfect match and are resistant to accept the effort that comes with hiring for potential or taking say an 80% fit. But as the labour market tightens further, you may find it is more productive to hire and train than to wait it out for that 100% match. This approach requires the buy-in of hiring managers and the appropriate onboarding and learning to be in place, so join up with your HRBP and Learning colleagues is key.
Key takeaway
These are a few of the ways that skills-based thinking can help keep talent acquisition practices up to date. If you’re interested in learning how Simply’s Rightskilling Platform can support you to deliver the capabilites and skills you need and meet your talent acquisiton KPIs, get in touch on the below details.
Simply. The rightskilling platform.
The strategy-led, data-driven way to conquer skill gaps.
Simply uses data and machine learning to define your skills strategy, build the skills architecture you need to make it happen, and pinpoints how to rightskill your workforce, fast. Learn more here, follow Simply here or get in touch at info@simplygetresults.com to discuss your needs and book a demo.