When universities first began using Facebook as part of their overall marketing and recruitment strategies, they embraced the common practice of applying filters, often on the basis of age, gender, geography and other demographics, to better target ads to find the most relevant candidates.
Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of this type of highly strategic ad placement is that some potential candidates never saw your advert. By restricting job postings to only certain locations, for example, you might have missed out on well qualified candidates outside your targeted geography. This type of bias has plagued university recruitment.
Fortunately, Facebook has recently made an adjustment to its ad targeting policies to help address these pervasive concerns about biases and discrimination in recruitment. Facebook’s new rules and regulations will help your university find and attract the most qualified candidates.
Now more than ever before, including social media platforms to your broader marketing and recruitment strategy is essential. These new rules will help your university eliminate biases and attract the most qualified candidates.
As early as 2016, Facebook faced pressure to rethink their ad targeting practices. The American Civil Liberties Union, Outten & Golden LLP, the Communications Workers of America, job seekers and consumers, and fair housing and civil rights organizations across industries have pushed back on ad targeting by highlighting the harm to already marginalized groups.
These groups of civil rights activists found that because Facebook could ensure certain ads were only delivered to users based on gender, a specific age range, or location (among other demographics and interests), their “job advertising practices violate federal civil rights laws prohibiting sex and age discrimination in employment.”
As a result, they filed a lawsuit causing Facebook to change its advertising policies. These policies were first introduced in the United States in 2019 and initially applied only to US- or Canadian-based companies or companies advertising in those two countries. However, Facebook has recently started to enforce these policies in Europe as well.
To better serve its global community of users, Facebook now has several ad categories with specific guidelines about what information can and cannot be used to select audiences. These ad categories are meant to better serve those involved in the credit, employment, and housing sectors as well as those involved in social issues and politics, by eliminating bias from advertising. More specifically, the new Facebook regulations focus on discrimination based on age, location, and other demographics like gender and personal interests.
As a university employer, when choosing your ad audience, you can no longer set an age range you want to target so as not to discriminate against potential candidates based on age. Furthermore, Facebook no longer allows any detailed targeting like other demographics, interests and behaviours. These measures help to ensure discriminatory practices are avoided.
Recruitment for academic positions is not easy. While there are thousands of universities and thousands of potential candidates, matching them to one another can feel a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. It takes time and patience.
Without targeted ads to the most relevant demographic groups, you may fear you’ll be wasting your resources. However, Facebook’s algorithms will adjust as your ad gains traction. It’s really the content of the ad that determines its the audience. If you’ve written a good ad that appeals to your desired candidate, they will click on it when they see it. Facebook learns from who interacts with your ad and show it to people who are similar those who clicked. As long as you’ve crafted a well-written advert, you will find it not only reaches your intended audience but it does so without any discrimination.
It can also be advantageous to partner up with a recruitment marketing company to help make sure your ad reaches the candidates you want. This partner can create Facebook audiences based on their platform users so Facebook has to do less guessing to find the right audience for your recruitment.
Advertising on social media is critical for any university. Not only will a thoughtful and comprehensive approach to recruiting on these platforms give you access to the most qualified and impressive candidates, it will actually help you eliminate any bias —explicit or implicit— from the process.
Because you can no longer target potential candidates based on certain demographic information, you need to let your job advert speak for itself. This means a great title, explaining the position accurately, and using gender-neutral language. Then let the algorithms do what they’re designed to do…find you your next colleague.
Writing a good job advert is the basis for successful recruitment. Your job advert is like a door to new possibilities. You want to convince qualified candidates to open it up and come through. Although you can share the advert widely, if it’s not appealing and poorly written, potential candidates will pass by without another thought.
You may have the most amazing job opening, with world class researchers and award-winning facilities, but if you can’t entice candidates to apply, it won’t matter. Writing an appealing job advert is the first step to finding the most qualified candidates.
Here are a few tips to help you write a compelling and appealing job advert that will get you top applicants.
The title of your open position is arguably the most important part of your job advert. Just as you might keep walking past a shop with nothing interesting or relevant in the window, a misleading or overly-vague title won’t get potential candidates to click through to learn more.
Your job title should clearly state the position (“PhD in engineering” is better than “PhD student”) but not try to do too much more. Anything too creative can be confusing. Keep it SEO friendly by limiting yourself to 70 characters and avoid cramming in unnecessary keywords.
Once you get people to click through to read the job description, make sure you’ve taken the time to write a descriptive yet concise advert. If you find you’re getting applicants with mismatched skills or experience, carefully review how the job description is written. You may need to revise by changing or adding more specifics about the expectations of the position or your preferred skills and experiences.
There is a delicate balance between brevity and description. You want to include just the right amount of information about the job. Sometimes this line might not be clear until you start to receive a few CVs. Aim to be descriptive but realistic about what the job entails and your ideal candidate.
Ensuring you are reaching the most qualified group of candidates means trying to eliminate any kind of bias or gendered language. Gender language isn’t just about using inclusive pronouns. Universities should be cognizant of the adjectives they use in job adverts as studies have shown certain adjectives (like decisive and determined) to be more masculine than others, and therefore less inclusive.
To further appeal to a diverse pool of candidates, consider including a few unique benefits your university provides. Whether it’s scientific freedom, funding, professional development opportunities, or work/life benefits, think about the big draws for marginalized groups.
Explicitly stating your university’s commitment to diversity is another powerful way to appeal to a broad range of candidates. Although it may seem obvious, reassuring job seekers with a clear and definitive statement will show candidates you’re serious.
Many younger academics especially, are looking for universities that value diversity and a sense of social responsibility. They want to work for an institution that understands people of all backgrounds and identities make for a richer, more robust community.
It can be tempting to simply replace one PhD position with another but taking the time to write a fresh job advert can make a big difference in attracting the best fit. Searching job boards can be monotonous. A carefully written advert allows you to really think about how to target the exact skills and experiences you’re looking for.
Ditch the standard templates in favor of an original advert to find your ideal match.
Think of your job advert as the first impression for academics. The more appealing your advert is, the more qualified candidates you’ll have from which to choose.
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Many universities are taking a critical look at the ethnic and gender makeup of their faculties and staff. Women, in particular, are often underrepresented in scientific research groups and as tenured faculty. As a result, many institutions are rethinking their staffing and hiring processes in order to increase the number of women in their applicant pool.
To achieve greater diversity at your university, you need to start with attracting a diverse applicant pool. Here’s now to attract more female applicants.
Remove gender bias from your job advert
While your university’s reputation and cultural history certainly play a role in attracting certain candidates, your job advert also influences the types of candidates who apply. In order to appeal more to women and people of marginalized gender, take the following four steps:
1. Use gender neutral language
There is quite a bit of research from the last decade or so about gender-charged adjectives and their role in deterring women from applying for certain positions. These adjectives (like decisive and determined) tend to discourage people of marginalized gender from applying. To keep your job descriptions gender neutral, be mindful of the adjectives you use and stick to factual words that describe the position and the skills necessary to do the job. There are several websites and apps that will run scans on the text of your advert and flag potential problems. Use them!
2. Limit requirements
In a Harvard Business Review article, Tara Sophia Mohr took a deeper dive into the often quoted statistic that women only apply to jobs when they meet 100% of the qualifications while men apply when they meet only 60%. She found that,“What held [women] back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process.” Most women believe that the requirements listed, were in fact required.
Instead of a lengthy bullet pointed list of requirements, take a critical look at the skills and qualities absolutely necessary versus those that are preferred, but not critical to performing the job. Chances are, it will also help you clarify exactly the type of person you need to fill the role.
3. State family friendly benefits
By explicitly stating your institution’s family-friendly policies in your job advert, more women (and people with families) should be encouraged to apply. These policies can include parental leave, campus child care, family friendly events, and flexible hours. As the Center for Women’s Education at the University of Michigan writes, “research suggests that institutions that do not accommodate family caregiving suffer in the competitive academic workplace.” Ensure your university is attracting more female candidates by mentioning these policies in the job advert.
4. Express commitment to diversity
Like the inclusion of your university’s family-friendly policies, expressing your community’s commitment to diversity is an easy and quick way to make an important statement. This does not have to be lengthy but it will make all potential applicants feel included and encouraged to apply. The more specific you can be, the better. For example, by explicitly stating how you will improve—like increasing female faculty by a certain percentage—will not just state your commitment but show it.
Promote your vacancies on social media
Once you’ve removed the gender bias from the text of your job advert itself, another key way to reach a more diverse group of applicants is by using social media. Social platforms with job boards like LinkedIn aren’t traditionally as popular with academics, but a strong and active presence on Facebook, Instagram, and especially Twitter, is incredibly important in recruiting researchers. Using these channels allows you to reach not only active but also passive job seekers.
Since they’re not actively pursuing new positions, passive job seekers don’t check job boards. If you only post your vacancy there, you won’t reach this important candidate group. While it may feel futile to focus on passive job seekers, in a Talent Solutions report, LinkedIn found that approximately 70% of the global workforce are passive job seekers. And, according to Betterteam, “80% of employers say social recruiting helps them find passive candidates.” Social media is an incredibly powerful way to reach out to the potential job seekers you’re missing by only using job boards.
Additionally, an active personal or lab social media presence is a great way to showcase your commitment to improving diversity in academia. You can post pictures of female researchers in labs, profiles of parents sharing how they create a work/life balance, and post news and updates about the work your female colleagues or students are doing. In this way, you can help position yourself as an attractive potential employer to female job seekers.
Paid campaigns are important too
If you are looking to attract more female candidates, paid social media campaigns are invaluable.
The biggest advantage of paid social media campaigns is that you can target a specific audience. For universities looking to recruit more female employees within a certain field of study, this is huge. Sponsored social media campaigns allow you to carefully select the audience you reach with your ads. Nearly all recruitment experts like Zippia agree, “social recruitment comes with incredible ability to laser-target certain groups of people for the available vacancies.”
Invest in employer branding and content marketing for long term success
Although there are some strategies you can implement in the short term (like writing gender neutral job adverts and posting to social media), positioning your institution as an attractive employer for women requires you to think beyond the next vacancy. The most effective way to consistently attract more female candidates is to develop a long term strategy that incorporates employer branding and content marketing.
While some of your employer brand is determined by others (like your employees, students, and the work you put out), some of your employer brand can be shaped by the information and marketing you create. If your long term goal is to attract more women, think about how you can better align your employer brand with that goal. Dr Graham Little, Partner & Head, Global Research Leadership at executive search firm Perrett Laver says, “Think about your website, your promotional materials and wider collateral–are you showing yourself as the organisation you are aspiring to be?”
Content marketing is a powerful tool for communicating your employer brand since it allows you to show, rather than tell, how you support gender diversity. Through targeted content marketing in the form of blogs, articles, or social media posts, you can explain why diversity and inclusion are important for your department and university. Content marketing is especially useful as it ultimately creates more brand awareness and name recognition for your university, which in turn helps to attract, engage, and retain talented researchers and academics. With regular, relevant content geared towards female academics, you will reach both active and passive job seekers.
Although passive job seekers may not immediately apply for your vacancy, over time they will become more familiar with your institution and work and more likely to apply in the future. Adding more women to this candidate pipeline is more likely to lead to increases in female applicants in the future.
Further reading on diversifying your applicant pool
Many universities are taking a critical look at the ethnic and gender makeup of their faculties and staff. Women, in particular, are often underrepresented in scientific research groups and as tenured faculty. As a result, many institutions are rethinking their staffing and hiring processes in order to increase the number of women in their applicant pool.
According to recent data from the American Association of University Professors, “even though women now account for 47 percent of full-time faculty members, they are overrepresented in non-tenure-track positions.” They also found that the representation of women decreased as academic rank increased with only 32.5% of full professors being women.
This data was collected in 2018 though, before Covid transformed our daily lives. The pandemic revealed real and significant inequities between male and female responsibilities as caregivers and academics, with women juggling far more than men. A March 2021 article from executive search firm Perrett Laver notes that, “27% of male scholars said [Covid] lockdown was providing them with more time to research and write. That number is around a third lower for women.”
As the world starts to recover from the global pandemic and academic hiring picks up, universities are eager to attract more female candidates to their applicant pools. Here are a few ways to get started.
Keep your job description gender neutral
It may seem obvious but if you’re looking to attract more female candidates, use gender neutral language in your job advert.
Steering clear of gender pronouns is a good place to start but don’t forget to take a closer look at the number and kinds of adjectives you use. Words like competitive and dominant are more masculine while words like collaborative and supportive are more feminine. These words often create unconscious bias and ultimately impact which candidates apply. Although it would be great to eliminate bias from these adjectives, it’s easier to simply eliminate them from your job advert. Iris Bohnet, Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School writes, “it’s easier to de-bias organizations’ practices and procedures than to de-bias mindsets.”
To reduce gendered language keep your job advert dry, factual, and to the point. List titles and responsibilities of the job without qualifying adjectives. The Harvard Business Review also found the longer the list of required skills, the less likely you are to attract female job seekers. Women are more likely to believe these skills are in fact required and not merely desirable.
Include information on family-friendly policies at your university
As women often still have more caregiving responsibilities at home, including your university’s family friendly policies will not only show a commitment to gender equality, it will provide applicants tangible solutions to their potential concerns about balancing family and work. For example, noting that you have day care facilities, parental leave, or flexible hours will help assure female applicants (and other parents or caregivers) they are welcomed and desired in your community.
Promote your vacancies on social media
Social media is increasingly popular as a tool to find jobs and network professionally. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram are increasingly popular among academics and can be used to reach both active and passive job seekers. With 4.48 billion people actively using social media, posting your job vacancies on these popular sites is critical. Social media is a great way to cast a wider net and reach more applicants–especially women.
Additionally, an active personal or lab social media presence is a great way to showcase your commitment to improving diversity in academia. You can post pictures of female researchers in labs, profiles of parents sharing how they create a work/life balance, and post news and updates about the work your female colleagues or students are doing. In this way, you can help position yourself as an attractive potential employer to female job seekers.
Create a long term strategy featuring recruitment marketing
The most effective way to consistently increase the amount of female applicants is to develop a long term strategy to attract female talent. This ongoing approach should incorporate employer branding and content marketing into your recruitment marketing.
Your employer brand is partly determined by university employees, students, and potential candidates and includes how people discuss your organization across their networks. Content marketing is a powerful tool for communicating your employer brand since it allows you to show, rather than tell, how you support gender diversity. Through targeted content marketing in the form of blogs, articles, or social media posts, you can explain why diversity and inclusion are important for your department and university.
With a thoughtful approach to recruitment marketing, you can ensure your talent pool will grow wider and more diverse.
Thanks to greater awareness about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, many universities are looking to increase the number of women in their programs. Too often this means only taking steps to attract more women when there is an upcoming vacancy. This short term approach can yield some positive results, but your chances of increasing the number of female applicants greatly improves with a longer recruitment strategy.
Whether you have an institutional or department level goal of getting more female applicants, thinking about your brand and how you market your university is paramount. Although there are some strategies you can implement in the short term (like writing gender neutral job adverts and posting to social media), positioning your institution as an attractive employer for women requires you to think beyond the next vacancy.
Start with thoughtful employer branding
Institutions need to go beyond just a sentence in their job adverts stating that they’re an equal opportunity employer. They need to show applicants who they are and the work that inspires them. A thoughtful approach to employer branding can help develop your university’s reputation and messaging.
While some of your employer brand is determined by others (like your employees, students, and the work you put out), some of your employer brand can be shaped by the information and marketing you create. If your long term goal is to attract more women, think about how you can better align your employer brand with that goal. Dr Graham Little, Partner & Head, Global Research Leadership at executive search firm Perrett Laver says, “Think about your website, your promotional materials and wider collateral–are you showing yourself as the organisation you are aspiring to be?”
Invest in content marketing
One of the most effective ways to continue to develop your employer brand and create a more diverse faculty is by sharing your commitment to diversity and inclusion with potential job seekers. To do this, your institution needs to embrace content marketing.
Content marketing is the best tool for communicating your employer brand since it allows you to show, rather than tell, how you support their female employees. Through targeted content marketing, you can explain why diversity and inclusion are important for your department and your university. This could be in the form of blogs and articles posted to your website, social media posts, or other marketing materials.
Content marketing is especially useful as it ultimately creates more brand awareness and name recognition for your university, which in turn helps to attract, engage, and retain talented researchers and academics. With regular, relevant content geared towards female academics, you will reach both active and passive job seekers.
Although passive job seekers may not immediately apply for your vacancy, over time they will become more familiar with your institution and work and more likely to apply in the future. Adding more women to this candidate pipeline is more likely to lead to increases in female applicants in the future.
Let your female employees speak for themselves
One powerful way to show your passion for increasing female employees is to show applicants what it’s like to be a part of your community. Choose female ambassadors who can communicate genuinely about how your institution has helped them fulfil their potential. This might include a discussion on the support they received from colleagues, the institutional policies that helped them balance work and family life, or simply feeling valued for their contributions.
Promote this content on social media channels popular with women, like Facebook and Instagram. You should also use this type of content to target predominantly female audiences by sharing it with professional women’s organizations. Most social media channels have active female groups in nearly every field of study and discipline.
Get help from recruitment marketing specialists
Recruitment marketing takes time and focus. Ideally, you want to be continually working on these strategies and marketing activities. Unfortunately, many departments and universities simply don’t have the knowledge, time, or resources to do it themselves. We can help. We understand the nuances and quirks of academia, plus how to leverage social media and content marketing to generate awareness, consideration and interest in your institution as an employer.
Employer branding and content marketing need to be used on an ongoing basis to present your institution as an attractive potential employer for female researchers. With a little forethought and dedicated effort, you’ll find the number of female applicants steadily increasing to give a highly qualified, diverse staff.
In some ways, posting a vacancy and searching for a job has never been easier. For job seekers, the ease of internet searches makes finding open positions as easy as clicking a button. For those hiring, placing an ad on these sites can mean access to thousands of job seekers. And yet, the hiring process —matching the right person for the right job—still takes time and effort. If you are also hoping to attract a more diverse group of applicants, it can be especially difficult. Reaching female candidates for example, often takes a little more consideration.
Increasing the diversity within your institution is more important than simply making everyone feel welcomed and included. Institutions benefit from different ideas, opinions, and solutions to problems. In an article titled “Gender Diversity Leads to Better Science” published in PNAS, researchers argue that gender diversity “allows scientific organizations to derive an ‘innovation dividend’ that leads to smarter, more creative teams, hence opening the door to new discoveries.” For universities, greater gender diversity can mean broader perspectives and ideas leading to more comprehensive research studies, and more name recognition.
Social media can help you cast a wider net
Once you’ve removed the gender bias from the text of your job advert itself, another key way to reach a more diverse group of applicants is by using social media. Social platforms with job boards like LinkedIn aren’t traditionally as popular with academics, but a strong and active presence on Facebook, Instagram, and especially Twitter, is incredibly important in recruiting researchers. Using these channels allows you to reach not only active but also passive job seekers.
Active job seekers are those who are currently looking for jobs. They frequently visit job boards and monitor university career pages. Passive job seekers, on the other hand, are not necessarily looking to change jobs but, should they come across an appealing open position, they might be encouraged to learn more about the institution and what it offers.
Since they’re not actively pursuing new positions, passive job seekers don’t check job boards. If you only post your vacancy there, you won’t reach this important candidate group. While it may feel futile to focus on passive job seekers, in a Talent Solutions report, LinkedIn found that approximately 70% of the global workforce are passive job seekers. And, according to Betterteam, “80% of employers say social recruiting helps them find passive candidates.” Social media is an incredibly powerful way to reach out to the potential job seekers you’re missing by only using job boards.
You can also use your personal and lab social media accounts to be an ally and show your commitment to improving gender diversity in academia. Sharing pictures of the female researchers working in your lab, posting profiles of the influential women in your department, and highlighting papers written by your female faculty are all powerful ways to show you are passionate about gender diversity. This kind of “slice of life” information may be particularly important to women, who want to ensure that your university is a supportive environment in which they can thrive.
Increasing the diversity of your candidate pool is an important step to diversifying your faculty. With intentional usage of social media channels, you can increase your chances of appealing to a wider group of diverse applicants.
Competition for postdoc positions is fierce. For universities and processors looking to hire for these trainee positions, that’s good news. It means you have a wide selection of candidates from which to choose—assuming they are aware of you and your university, can easily find information about your projects, and are motivated enough to look for your open positions.
Unfortunately, finding qualified candidates for your relevant open positions can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. Knowing there are talented candidates out there but only receiving mediocre or irrelevant CVs, can be maddening.
However, spending money to advertise your postdoc, when you know talented candidates are desperately searching for the right position can feel equally maddening. Postdocs are short term, trainee positions, why waste the resources?
We understand that spending money to advertise these positions might not feel worth it. However, we also know there are several compelling reasons you should pay to advertise your postdoctoral positions.
Postdocs contribute tremendously to universities. According to the National Academies, “Successful postdocs help plan and carry out the institution’s research programs, build alliances and intellectual bridges to other institutions, raise the reputation of laboratories and departments, mentor graduate students, and increase the inflow of grant support.”
While a postdoc is a short term position, a postdoc’s contributions can be significant and long term. Think about the best postdoc you’ve had and their impact on your group. How does a small advertising cost compare to the sizable benefit of a highly talented postdoc?
You don’t have to worry that the advert fee will come at the expense of research funds. Many major funding agencies recognize there are costs associated with recruiting top talent for a funded project. As a result, these costs—such as airfare for on campus interviews and advert publishing fees—are usually considered eligible grant expenses.
You might think that rather than paying a nominal fee to advertise your postdoc, you’ll just post the vacancy for free on your own website instead. But there’s no guarantee that job seekers will actually see your posting this way. Why? First, this assumes candidates are already familiar with you and your work. Second, it assumes they are also regularly checking your site for job opportunities. With thousands of universities vying for the best talent, potential candidates have a lot of websites they can check.
Unfortunately search engines are of little help here. Job postings are only up for a few months at most, which isn’t long enough to rank highly in search engine results. It takes time for search engine “crawlers” to visit your site, index the information posted and then rank your site in their results. The deadline to submit an application will have long expired before your position ever appears in Google search results.
To save time, it is more effective for job seekers to visit job boards. By paying to use a job board, you’ll have access to interested candidates from all over the world. Don’t miss out on reaching tons of eyes because you can’t (yet) see the value of paying a small advertising fee.
The competition for postdocs is fierce. Instead of hoping job seekers will stumble upon your university, then visit your website, look for open positions, and apply, go to where the applicants are—job boards.
Once job seekers know you’re hiring, then all your other recruitment marketing streams will begin to pay dividends. They’ll see all the benefits of life at your university on social media, they’ll find information on your current research and group members on your updated website, and they’ll be motivated to follow through with a seamless application process.
While paying to advertise may feel like throwing money out the window, it’s not. It can actually mean the difference between finding excellent candidates who will make positive, long-term contributions to your university and spending countless hours filtering through irrelevant and mediocre applications only to have to cast your net once more.
You’ve got a fabulous opportunity for an eager academic you know would jump at the chance to work at your university. You craft an advert, post it to your website and wait. Days pass and you remind yourself how busy researchers and professors are. Weeks pass and you start scratching your head. Months pass and you are completely dumbfounded as to why you have only a handful of mediocre applications.
There could be several reasons why you’re not getting many applications for your open position. Lucky for you, all of them can be corrected and avoided so that you set yourself up for recruitment success.
Many academic positions are described in terms that are generic or too short. This not only results in a bland description that does not compel candidates to take action, it often makes your job and your university sound exactly like the hundreds of other academic jobs and universities.
If your job description is too short, it may leave job seekers confused about the scope and focus of the position. Potential applicants won’t take the time to apply to a position that sounds boring and vague.
Additionally, if your university creates pdfs for each call, don’t simply put a link to the pdf in your advert and call it a day. Take the time to copy all the relevant information in the job description itself so candidates don’t have to do detective work to figure out what the position is.
Applying to academic jobs is tedious with no guarantee that your time and effort will be rewarded with so much as an interview. If candidates have to do any extra or unnecessary work to even discern how to apply, they will not follow through with a completed application.
Even if this means a candidate has to follow a chain of links to get to the actual application, they likely won’t. Too many links — even if they are clearly labeled — can be frustrating when you’ve already spent hours starting at a screen browsing adverts.
Don’t make candidates do unnecessary work to find out what your job is about or how to apply. They won’t do it.
Most private sector companies have gone to simplified one-click application processes. According to CareerBuilder, “Most job seekers prefer a one-click apply and aren’t interested in spending more than 10 minutes on one job application.” While a 10 minute application process is impossible in academia, the principle behind it still applies. If your application process is exceptionally complicated, it will reduce the number of applicants.
Most academic jobs require an enormous amount of information. This can take hours to compile so job seekers will likely only follow through if they believe they are a perfect fit. This means you’re probably losing out on many great candidates.
In an Washington Post article titled The academic job market is a nightmare. Here’s one way to fix it., Colin Dickey addresses the laborious task of applying to academic jobs.
“If committees really take such concerns seriously, they need to stop asking for highly specific documents at the start of the process, even if they do call for them later. […] If committees absolutely need more specific information, they can always request it in the second or third round, when they have whittled their applicant pool down to those who at least stand a fighting chance of getting the job. There are plenty of ways search committees can do more with less.”
Consider what this actually requires of applicants. How much of this information is absolutely vital versus nice to know. There will be time down the road — when both you and the candidate are more invested in one another — to gather some of this information.
Of course you want the best, most qualified candidates possible for each open position. However, sometimes finding the best candidate does not mean stuffing the advert with every possible qualification you can think of.
Instead, be strategic about the most important, necessary qualifications. Think of this from the candidate’s perspective. As a job seeker, if you see the list of desired qualifications go on and on (and on!), you could get scared off thinking you are not a good fit.
Remember, you’re not looking for a perfect fit (there’s no such thing). When you have a position that lists too many qualifications, it makes the job seem like it’s tailor made for someone. Many highly qualified candidates who are missing a couple of qualifications will assume they are not a match, when in fact, they could tick more of the boxes than anyone else.
Research shows that women, in particular, who are already underrepresented, will likely be scared off thinking that they don’t meet your requirements.
When you’re browsing job advert after job advert, titles become increasingly incredibly important. As fatigue sets in, job seekers will move more quickly through adverts, scrolling by those that seem irrelevant or uninteresting. How will they decide? The title.
Titles can be especially tricky. You want to be specific, but not too specific. Avoid general titles like “PhD student wanted.” Be more specific. “PhD student in engineering wanted.”
If you write a title that is too specific, candidates who don’t match the title exactly won’t bother to click further. Remember, the title is the first thing job seekers will see. Be direct and specific and they’ll click through.
Many universities have relied on the traditional hiring strategy of writing a job advert and posting it on a job board. However, with universities facing increasing competition for talent and changes in candidates behaviour, this strategy is no longer effective.
Universities need to pivot to a more holistic recruitment approach and implement a recruitment marketing strategy to continue to stay competitive. In today’s hiring landscape, investing in a recruitment marketing based talent attraction strategy is essential for any forward-thinking university.
Many universities have relied on the traditional hiring strategy of writing a job advert and posting it on a job board. However, with universities facing increasing competition for talent and changes in candidates behaviour, this strategy is no longer effective.
Universities need to pivot to a more holistic recruitment approach and implement a recruitment marketing strategy to continue to stay competitive. In today’s hiring landscape, investing in a recruitment marketing based talent attraction strategy is essential for any forward-thinking university.
Recruitment marketing is the practice of using marketing strategies to promote the value of working for a particular employer as a way to attract, engage, and recruit employees. It is a process of actively promoting your institution to build awareness, interest, consideration, and ultimately get the best people to apply to become part of your university community.
Recruitment marketing means taking a thoughtful and patient perspective to attract and retain the best people. First, candidates must know your institution exists. Then they must be inclined to consider you as a potential employer. Lastly, they must be intrigued so they become invested in applying.
Using a recruitment marketing strategy will help you move candidates through each step of this process. As a result, your organization will get its share of amazing candidates who are invested in your organization and excited to make a match.
Recruitment marketing applies a funnel approach to hiring. At the top of the funnel is awareness.
Each step of recruitment marketing builds on the previous one to ultimately lead candidates through the application process. If a candidate is aware of your institution, interested in what you have to offer, and convinced your university is the right place for them to thrive, they are more invested in writing a quality application and more likely to accept your job offer.
Recruitment marketing is the tactic that a university uses to promote its employer brand. Before thinking about how to recruit candidates, a university needs to spend some time looking inward. What makes your organization unique and attractive to academic candidates? What sets you apart from the competition? How do you want candidates to see you?
Your employer brand is also partly determined by university employees, students, and potential candidates and how they discuss your organization across their networks. In this way, universities have less direct control of their image.
Recruitment marketing, on the other hand, has more of an external focus as it is more about how you communicate your brand and your story. Recruitment marketing allows you to have more control over your narrative which can be particularly powerful in attracting the best candidates. Although you can’t always control how people talk about your brand, you can shape the conversation with a targeted approach to recruitment.
Recruitment marketing has emerged at a time when the academic hiring landscape is changing. There are more qualified candidates than ever before competing for jobs, yet candidates are also becoming a bit more selective. Thanks to easy access to the internet and digital tools, as well as the proliferation of social media, the information about universities available to candidates is now much more robust. Candidates can now search for in-depth information about the work environment, the research they are concusting, potential colleagues and even more intangible aspects like the social and cultural benefits of different institutions.
As a result, candidates now behave more like consumers and universities need to market to them as such. The hiring process has shifted from universities choosing candidates, to candidates choosing the university.
At the same time, internationalization has dramatically increased the competition for top talent.
Universities are no longer competing with just the other universities in their region, they’re competing with the whole world. An institution that tops the national rankings will not necessarily have the same kind of name recognition outside of its home country. To stay competitive, universities must project a clear image to catch candidates’ attention.
Importantly, recruitment marketing helps you create a candidate pipeline. This means not only striving to reach active job seekers but also passive ones. Strong recruitment marketing allows your university to get on the radar of candidates who might not yet be ready to apply or might not be a match for any of your current open positions. It keeps academics interested in your brand, not just your available jobs.
These pipeline candidates will be some of your strongest applicants because they will already be excited by your university. By showcasing your groundbreaking research, facilities, or staff, you can catch their attention and prime them, so that when you do post a relevant vacancy they’re already convinced you’re the institution for them and are eager to apply.
In order to do effective recruitment marketing, you must embrace content marketing. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience to ultimately drive successful hires.
Because candidates are behaving more like customers, content marketing allows you to “sell yourself.” It is particularly useful in the early stages of the talent acquisition funnel when you are trying to increase awareness, consideration, and interest in applying to your institution.
Content marketing allows you to proactively disseminate information about who you are, what you do, and why potential candidates should choose you as an employer. This is usually achieved by:
In addition to content marketing, your recruitment marketing strategy also needs to include:
Recruitment marketing takes time and requires much more than many universities have previously invested in talent acquisition. But times have changed and if you want to attract and retain qualified candidates, recruitment marketing is invaluable.
Investing in recruitment marketing is investing in the future of your community. The more informed potential candidates are about your university, the more interested they will be in applying. A job advert simply cannot convey all the pertinent information about a particular job as well as all the ancillary benefits of your university. Recruitment marketing gives candidates a holistic view of who you are and how well they would fit in your community, generating a candidate pipeline.
The result? More informed, interested candidates who are more likely to complete their application, accept your job offer, and stay at your institution.
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Recruitment marketing is essential for any university looking to attract the best academics to their institution. It is the practice of using marketing strategies to promote the value of working for a certain employer in order to attract, engage, and recruit employees. However, because many universities do not currently take a recruitment marketing approach to their hiring, it can be difficult for institutions that want to start using recruitment marketing to understand exactly what it looks like.
In order to do recruitment marketing effectively, your institution needs to have certain skills and competencies as well as a “long game” mindset. Generally, universities only think about attracting talent when they have an open position, however recruitment marketing is an ongoing process that doesn’t just aim to fill a single vacancy. It aims to create a candidate pipeline.
Recruitment marketing requires more than simply writing a job advert and posting it on a few job boards. It is a comprehensive, and thoughtful way to build awareness of all that your university has to offer so that more candidates seek out your positions.
The first steps
Because of the increasing internationalization of higher education, candidates are now casting a wider net in their job searches. They also have more access to information about universities from a variety of sources including university websites, job wikis, and social media. As a result, academic candidates now behave more like customers searching for the perfect product.
The process of “selling” your “product” (in this case, your vacancy) has become similar to a corporate marketing strategy. Job seekers aren’t satisfied by finding one vacancy that matches their area of expertise. They “shop around” and look for the best offer. Recruitment marketing has evolved reaction to this new way of looking for and applying for jobs. In order to attract top talent to your vacancies, you have to employ some of the same practices that businesses use to convince consumers to buy their products.
Whether you’re looking to buy new shoes or find a postdoc position in anthropology, your search starts in the same place: Google. Recruitment marketing requires that universities be mindful of this and use SEO best practices across all their content channels. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of increasing the amount of quality traffic a website gets from search engines. Websites with better SEO rank higher in the search engine results. There are many variables that impact a webpage’s SEO, including keywords, backlinks, loading speeds, mobile compatibility, and labeled images.
Since the first step of recruitment marketing involves growing awareness of your university, it is imperative that you rank well in searches. It’s not just your job adverts that should be optimized for search engines, all your digital content should be SEO optimized. This includes landing pages, blog posts and articles.
Create relevant content
Your university should actively create as many opportunities as possible to draw in potential candidates. One way to actively spark awareness and deepen consideration is by publishing frequent and relevant content. Content such as news articles or employee blogs allows you to speak much more broadly about your institution and topics of interest to potential job applicants. This content should be published and broadcast across all your social media channels in order to provide as many touch points as possible.
Additionally, you should spend some time actively evaluating all the employee information that is currently on your website. Is it up to date and accurate? Does it truly showcase the benefits you offer as an employer? Does it provide compelling reasons to want to invest time in a job application?
Creating content for recruitment marketing purposes does take time, but it is crucial to each step of recruitment. It helps build awareness, consideration, and ultimately interest in applying among both active and passive job seekers. This kind of proactive content marketing will not only help you cast a wider net to find talented researchers, it may also help you retain them.
Even if someone is not looking for a job but reads an article about the kinds of work your university is doing, they will be more inclined to want to learn more. The more job seekers know about your university, the more they can evaluate if they will be a good fit.
Create a social media presence
Social media is an invaluable tool for building brand awareness and engaging potential employees. In a recent study, researchers found that “the number of social media users has increased by an average of more than 1.4 million each day over the past 12 months—that’s equal to 16.5 new users every single second.”
To effectively recruit top talent, universities need to actively engage them on social media. These channels provide an excellent opportunity to grab the attention of job seekers, but they are often underutilized. Universities typically build their social media strategies around student recruitment, missing out on a powerful recruitment marketing channel for potential employees. Social media is where you can have a little fun promoting your university and work environment to give potential applicants a taste of your workplace culture. For example, you can post interesting or little known facts about your location, do faculty profiles, or discuss some of the extracurricular benefits of joining your community. The more places you are visible, the more chances you have to attract the interest of candidates from all over the world.
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