According to HR experts, 58% of job seekers turn to job boards to find their next jobs.
In terms of social media, about 18% of those looking for a job use social platforms to engage with hiring managers. And 28% of recruiters invest in job boards to find their candidates.
At Nurse.com, we want recruiters to know what HR professionals say about our job board. Our job board continues to receive high marks compared to other nursing job boards, according TheJobNetwork.com.
We caught up with Tammy Pennington, product manager with Nurse.com, to get the scoop on what information needs to be included in your job board postings and other best practices.
If you’re among the recruiters using job boards to attract nurses, here are some tips to help you make those job postings more effective.
Q: Why does Nurse.com rank as one of the top job boards for nurses?
A: Nurses are in high demand. They don’t have to sift through pages and pages of random jobs on a major job board.
They can afford to be choosy and tend to choose a site they trust and a place they may often visit. Nurse.com provides much more than just job posts.
Nurses may come to Nurse.com for continuing education or to read nursing-centric content, and then decide to browse jobs.
One of the best advantages of the Nurse.com job boards is that employers know the primary audience is nurses.
They can use acronyms and titles that nurses will recognize and make their job descriptions more tailored to appeal to job seekers with clinical knowledge.
Q: How important is the headline and job description to attract nurses to a job posting?
A: The job title does matter. Think of what you might put in the search bar when you search for a job.
The basics need to be included, such as RN, days. Be sure to add a filtering word. A recommended practice is to add a specialty or title, such as nurse manager, ICU days. Better yet, try to go a bit deeper with keywords like nurse manager, ICU, days and neonatal unit.
If you’re advertising a job with a short title, try to gain attention by including something interesting like what else you can offer.
Examples include flexible hours, weekends off, relocation bonus — this gets a nurse’s attention. But only choose one and don’t overload it with too much information.
Q: What common mistake do employers make when they spend money advertising nursing jobs?
A: Using standard, no-frills, similar descriptions will get you either too few clicks, or get many applications from unqualified job seekers. Writing well-crafted job descriptions will pay off in the end.
Q: What is the risk of using generic job descriptions?
A: It is very tempting to cut and paste generic job descriptions when you have many jobs to post. But you’re going to end up with a large amount of applications from unqualified job seekers who don’t meet your needs.
Q: How much is too much information in a job description?
A: Don’t be afraid to list the deal breakers in the job description — the minimum requirements and that “special something” the applicant will need to do to land the job.
Q: What advice can you give recruiters who struggle with the right wording to capture the essence of a job description?
A: If you need some help with job description wording, ask your best employees what they love about your company or ask them to describe their duties.
Getting input from the employees who do the job will help you know the keywords and perks so the best candidates will actually want to respond to that job posting.
If your job posting is on a web search results page next to 15 other jobs with the exact same title, you will need to do something extra to make your posting stand out and entice the nurse to click on your job.
Act fast or watch candidates walk
Once you attract talented nurses to your organization, don’t risk losing those prospective employees because of hesitant decision making.
Embrace the opposite mindset. Decisive hiring managers who strike with speed and accuracy help organizations land qualified candidates and place them in jobs.
“Decisive hiring managers hire 10% more high-quality candidates and 11% fewer low-quality candidates than typical hiring managers. Additionally, organizations that drive decisive hiring manager behaviors reduce time-to-fill by 17%,” according to a June 2019 news release from Gartner, a leading research and advising firm, headquartered in Stamford, Conn.