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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Just as any corporation needs to market their business to attract quality employees, universities also need to market themselves to attract top talent. But too often they do not.
Many universities have relied on traditional hiring strategies that consist of writing a job advert and posting it on a job board. However, as internationalization has increased the competition for top talent and candidate behaviour has changed, 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. Recruitment marketing, while not a new idea in the private sector, is rarely discussed in the context of academic hiring. But in today’s hiring landscape, investing in a recruitment marketing based talent attraction strategy is essential for any forward-thinking university.
What is recruitment marketing?
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, and ultimately get the best people to become part of your university community.
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 are no longer restricted to simply understanding which departments a university has and their current vacancies. They 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, academic 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.
Recruitment marketing integrates new skills into attracting and engaging top talent. It requires institutions to adopt a funnel approach to recruitment. At the top of the tunnel, sits awareness of your university, followed by consideration of your university, and finally genuine interest in your university. Essentially, candidates need to know your university exists, then feel compelled to learn more about it, and lastly, be interested enough to invest time in applying to your open position.
In order to be successful at every step of the process, academic institutions need to find relevant ways to find and attract top talent. This requires a comprehensive approach to hiring with a specific marketing and advertising skill set — not something universities typically have the time or resources to invest in.
This thoughtful approach can only work with a complimentary digital marketing and advertising strategy which includes creating regular, engaging content and posting that content to some kind of landing page. It also requires a targeted social media strategy as well as technical knowledge of SEO and landing page design. In order to best create this holistic marketing approach, it is imperative for universities to think critically about the candidate experience.
Employer Branding vs. Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment marketing and employer branding are often discussed in a similar context and while they do share some aspects, they differ in some significant ways. Like recruitment marketing, employer branding originated in the private sector but is now vital to academic recruitment.
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? A well thought out employer brand can serve as a roadmap for where your organization wants to go and how you will get there.
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 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.
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The University of Jyväskylä is an internationally renowned research university and an expert in education that focuses on human and natural sciences. We spoke to Marjo Salmenkivi, Team Leader, Recruitment Team, to learn more about how the university uses social media to create awareness and promote its employer brand.
You use job promotion campaigns on social media for many of your international faculty recruitments. Why do you believe it’s important to take such a proactive approach to faculty recruitment?
MS: We use job promotion campaigns to promote assistant professorships, which are important recruitments for our university. When we hire a person for this type of a position, we commit to a years-long relationship since those on the tenure track can eventually get tenure. By using job promotion campaigns, we seek to attract top talent to the University of Jyväskylä. Our university is a small organisation on a global scale, so it’s important for us to make the University of Jyväskylä known and to talk about the top-quality research conducted at the university. It’s especially important to specifically reach passive job seekers, whose attention we might not otherwise be able to capture.
You are a university that really understands the value of creating awareness of your institution and promoting your employer brand. What would you say to a university that doesn’t yet understand why awareness is so valuable?
MS: Increasing awareness of our university through all available channels is certainly worth it. You should promote your employer brand on all available internal channels, but it’s also good to utilise commercial channels too, especially if your university isn’t the most well known. Talk about the research done at your university, about your researchers, and why coming to work with you is a good choice. Every university has their own strengths, talk openly about yours!
We’ve seen, for example, that the social media campaigns we’ve run with Academic Positions have reached a very large group of potential applicants. We’re repeatedly present among a relevant audience, and because of this, the awareness of our organisation keeps growing. Whether the average number of applicants we’ve received or the average quality of applicants has increased is difficult to comment on since we’re so early in the process. We’ve only recently begun with our employer branding marketing, but we hope to see them increase. We will continue to invest more into analytics and monitor the stream of applicants in our recruitment system, and thus be able to have concrete data on the impact these campaigns have, and adjust our marketing strategy accordingly.
In any case, I believe that deliberate and continual investments in employer branding marketing will increase awareness of the university and thus bring us better quality applications to our open positions, as well as engage and pique the interest of passive applicants.
Looking into the future, what are some things you’re seeing now that you think will have a big impact on the way universities attract top talent in the next few years?
The competition for the top researchers will undoubtedly continue to be intense in the future. To stand out from among the competition, you have to work purposefully with employer branding marketing in the long term. We strive to regularly be visible in international forums and promote our researchers and their research. I believe that our consistent investments in employer branding marketing will bear fruit in the long term.
As a university that has very quickly adopted modern digital recruitment practices, how are you trying to stay ahead of the curve?
The digitalisation of the recruitment processes at our university continues, and we’re committed to continuing this work which makes the application processes easier for both domestic and international researchers. We also review our recruitment processes and work to make them even more effortless and transparent than before. We’ve created a recruitment team dedicated to taking care of open positions and applicant communications. They tell our applicants how the recruitment is progressing and quickly let them know when their application doesn’t make it into the next phase of the recruitment process. We know that anyone applying for a position would hope they get the job, but in the cases where this doesn’t happen, they are immediately notified so they can focus their sights on new opportunities without delay. We also inform our applicants about who gets chosen for the open position and, whenever possible, we give applicants feedback on why they weren’t chosen. We’re also looking into implementing a system to make it possible to give this feedback even more effectively, utilising intelligent technological tools to do so.
We also have an excellent International Staff Services Team that helps our international staff and faculty with practical matters associated with their arrival to Finland, like residence permits or work permits. They also arrange various activities to help bring the community together. In addition to this, the ISS Team’s website has a large variety of information available, ranging from work and integration to society to leisure and the Jyväskylä region itself. We are also committed to employer branding marketing, promoting relevant material on our social media channels and on our own website. We value our own employees and alumni as ambassadors of our organisation. In addition to this, external partners like Academic Positions and exposure through these channels—like with Academic Stories and job promotion campaigns on social media for open positions—are an important part of that strategy.
Hiring for an academic position can be difficult and time consuming. Competition for academic jobs is high and potential applicants are all over the globe. Thanks to increased researcher mobility and the explosion of new universities in the past few decades, recruitment for academic positions has grown increasingly more challenging. With so many universities vying for talent, it can be difficult to distinguish your job and university from others, leading to higher instances of failed recruitment.
Although you could simply write a generic job advert and post it on a free job board, the likelihood that you’ll find quality candidates in a reasonable amount of time is low. Finding the right person for your job requires patience and a targeted marketing approach. Using a platform like Academic Positions to advertise your vacancies can result in more relevant applicants in less time.
Failed recruitment is costly. It means more time being short staffed, more time crafting an advert that will attract new or better candidates, and perhaps more money to advertise and market your position again. However, with a bit more initial investment, you can improve your candidate search and get your position filled by the right person, the first time around.
With so many free job boards, we understand why you may be wary of paying to advertise your vacancies. We’ve built a reputation of trust and efficiency with our comprehensive approach to academic recruitment that will help you attract more qualified candidates. Here are five reasons universities choose Academic Positions to help with their recruitment.
Our job boards allow job seekers to sign up for job alerts for more than 600 academic fields. Many free services allow only a handful of custom alerts, drastically reducing the number of relevant candidates who will see the advert. Our specific and targeted approach to advertising your position means more and better candidates will see your job posting vastly increasing your potential applicant pool.
All advertisements posted on Academic Positions include a job alert which notifies relevant registered job seekers about your vacancy. Instead of hoping that qualified applicants stumble upon your job advert, we can help make it more visible so more qualified candidates find it. Our helpful guides to writing targeted job postings will ensure they click through to read more.
Many free job boards require you to upload and publish your own advert. At Academic Positions, we provide hassle free publication by taking care of advertising your open positions for you.
Just as you are experts in your field, we are experts in ours. We let you do what you do best and we’ll take care of the rest.
Our job advertising checklist includes everything you need to do before, during, and after the application period to set yourself up for recruitment success.
Unlike the majority of our competitors, our job board is truly international. We have an international portal where we post adverts in English, as well as 13 national portals where we post adverts in the national language. You’ll reach more candidates with the ability to post vacancies in multiple languages.
Academic job seekers are eager to find the most relevant and advanced research facilities within their field of study, and recognize that this often means looking internationally. Because they are passionate about their studies and professional community, academics are happy to explore opportunities worldwide. We help you capitalize on this willingness to find the right fit by helping you find the best candidates no matter where in the world they are.
We take a data-driven approach to recruitment marketing to provide our customers with the most efficient and proven methods for advertising open positions. Our performance reports give you unique insights into the performance of your advert on our job board, taking the guesswork out of what is, or is not, working.
Optimising your recruitment with data will help you attract better candidates, track agency performance, and foster a goal-driven working environment. Our metrics will help you recruit smarter, saving you time and money.
While it would be nice to simply publish your vacancy online and know that people will find it, it takes time and effort to make sure your content ranks in the search results. In order for potential candidates to be able to find your job advert online, the website you publish it on needs to have good Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website gets from search engines so that it ranks at the top of the search results. Because most candidates start their academic job search by using a search engine, if the job website doesn’t rank in the top results, you’ll be behind your competitors right from the start.
Luckily, we are well versed in SEO best practices and consistently rank in the top search results for most academic job queries. We work tirelessly to make sure our listings remain at the top of search engine searches so we can deliver high quality traffic to all the jobs published on our site. Free job boards cannot always guarantee such excellent search engine rankings.
Just because you can post a job for free, does not mean you should. In fact, while you may be saving money up front, a failed recruitment campaign can end up costing you hours of wasted time. Investing in a paid job board will not only leave you with more time to pursue your research, it will also provide you with top talent to enhance your work and elevate your university’s profile.
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Academic recruitment seems like a relatively straightforward process. You post a job, find a pool of qualified applicants, and choose the one best suited for the job. Unfortunately, we know it’s not that easy. Even with a stellar job posting and description, there are so many other factors at play that make academic recruitment particularly challenging.
Most HR staffs and search committees would love to have a robust pool of qualified candidates from which to choose. But finding someone with the right competencies, who is available for your start date, in your location (or willing to move), speaks the right language, and sees your advert then applies…can feel like finding the needle in the haystack.
For many universities, the reality is often a limited applicant pool with irrelevant, unqualified, or simply mediocre applicants. Whatever the reason, not getting enough applicants and having to repost a vacancy is not only frustrating, but also time consuming and costly.
Although there is no magic formula or remedy, there are several steps you can take to put your university in the best position to reach more and better applicants.
Step 1: Improve the text of your job advert
Because the job advert is the primary way candidates will learn about your job, it’s best to start with an honest look at the job description. If you are receiving candidates with irrelevant work experience or skills, you might not have explained the details of the job accurately. If you simply did not receive many applications, your job description might be too brief. You need to include enough information about the job to convince people to apply. You may also consider adjusting the formatting of your ad and adding bullet points to improve the readability.
However, you also want to be careful not to include so many requirements that only a few people apply. People only apply to jobs they think they actually have a chance of getting. Be both descriptive and realistic in your job posting. Consider what the job entails and the kind of candidates you hope to attract and write the job advert with those considerations in mind.
Step 2: Carefully choose the job title
The job title is like a big, flashing light. It is the first thing job seekers see and can mean the difference between the perfect candidate clicking on the advert or simply scrolling by. First, the title should be specific. “PhD student in organic chemistry” is better than the more general “PhD student.” Because there is some nuance between countries about academic titles, avoid internal or country specific titles. For example, in Austria “university assistant” can mean “PhD student” but applicants outside of Austria or Europe might be unfamiliar with this distinction.
Our job advertising checklist includes everything you need to do before, during, and after the application period to set yourself up for recruitment success.
Step 3: Promote your employer brand
While there are certain characteristics that all universities share, no two universities are the same. Your institution has unique qualities that make it special. Be sure to highlight those features and promote all the ways in which your university is the best place to work. Think about how the university supports employees and the community as a whole, as well as location of the university and the available facilities. Research centers, libraries, labs, and sports facilities are all excellent distinguishers.
You want any potential applicants to clearly understand why your university is a better place to work than your competitors. Your university’s social media channels are a great place to help communicate your brand and create brand awareness. The more you can promote your institution, the more potential applicants will continue to seek out opportunities at your university.
Step 4: Increase your visibility
This may seem obvious, but in order to attract the most candidates, job seekers must know you have job openings. Because of the increased competition for university employees, it is no longer adequate to simply post your job on your university career page and hope the best candidates find it. Your vacancy must also be available online on relevant academic job boards. You can also advertise with professional associations in your field of study.
Consider not just advertising in the traditional sense, but also using social media to increase your university’s visibility. Working with academic recruitment marketing partners is another way to boost your visibility and build your brand. These companies are experts at increasing interest in your organization and attracting candidates.
Step 5: Review your application process
Of course you want to ensure you have well qualified candidates by asking for relevant details in the application, but are you asking too much in this phase of the hiring process? According to a study done by CareerBuilder, “60 percent of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity.” There is an enduring fallacy in academia that these 60 percent are candidates who don’t really want the job, but this isn’t the case. Highly qualified candidates are also discouraged by lengthy applications and academic applications in particular are notoriously long.
There may be parts of your application process that can be shortened or moved to a later stage in the process. Many candidates are reluctant to spend the time and energy on your application when they aren’t even sure they’ll hear from you. Both you and the applicants are more likely to give more time when you both feel you’ve got a real, vested interest.
Step 6: Beware of personal and unconscious biases
Like it or not, we all carry personal and unconscious biases. These are often certain ideas or stereotypes about gender, race, or nationality that may influence decision-making. Try not to overlook a candidate on the basis of anything other than the qualifications and work history they have shared. It can sometimes be helpful to ignore information like names or nationalities while you evaluate the rest of the application.
While examining your biases can be uncomfortable, it is essential if you want to attract and retain the best candidates available.
To learn more about how to improve your chances of a successful recruitment, download our job advertising checklist. This comprehensive checklist will ensure you don’t miss any vital steps before, during, or after the application period.
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Data is incredibly valuable when it comes to improving your hiring practices, as it allows you to optimise processes, save money, and increase the quality of your hires. Once you gather your data, either from your own internal methods or from your recruitment partner, you must utilise it efficiently.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how to start optimising your recruitment with internal data, as well as how you can keep your recruitment partners accountable to providing you with their data points, too.
Internal data
Access to recruitment data is valuable, but if you don’t know how to use it, you won’t see tangible improvements in your recruitment strategy. For example, let’s say that you’re currently tracking your interview to placement ratio; this involves tracking how many candidates it takes to successfully fill a role.
It’s a valuable metric to track, as it gives you an indication of the quality of candidates that you’re interviewing, as well as how long the decision-making process takes. This data can be used to optimise your recruitment in two key ways:
Tracking interview to placement ratio gives you the opportunity to see if there are issues with the way that you are selecting candidates for both video and campus interviews. If you find that the total number of people you have to interview in order to make a hire is increasing, especially for the same types of roles, it might be time to change up your interview questions. Perhaps you’re not asking the right questions so your candidates aren’t getting a chance to wow you. You might also want to change your process if you find that you are frequently needing to invite additional candidates for campus interviews in order to make a hire. If you can reduce the number of candidates you interview by a small percentage, you will save time and resources in the process.
This data gives you the opportunity to see how your interview to placement ratio affects your time to hire, as well as allowing you to see if you are frequently losing good candidates partway through your process because your time to hire is too long.
Understanding how your time to hire differs between different types of positions can help when you have to recruit for multiple positions simultaneously. For example, if you need to hire both a PhD student and a postdoc for a project and you know your time to hire is longer for a postdoc, you can start the postdoc recruitment process first.
You can see how one data point can positively impact your recruitment strategy, which is why we recommend introducing data tracking into your recruitment strategy.
In our downloadable guide, we have created a tracker that enables you to track up to 7 data points, however, don’t feel obliged to start with all 7. If you’re new to data-driven recruitment, start off with tracking 1-2 points and phasein other data points as you become more comfortable. Try to start by identifying a weak point you currently have within your institution and use that as the first data point you track.
Whether you’re new to data-driven recruitment or you’re a seasoned pro looking for new KPIs to track, this guide will help you take your recruiting to the next level.
Recruitment partners
For some roles, you may look to engage a recruitment partner to create more awareness and visibility of your vacancy. A good recruitment partner should be able to provide you with data about your performance on their platform and be able to advise you on how to use this data to improve your recruitment process.
So, what kind of data can a recruitment partner provide you with?
Depending on the type of recruitment partner you work with, you will have access to different data points. Here are some you may be able to acquire and how you can use them:
Optimising your recruitment with data doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, it can be a mixture of incorporating your internal and external data points and using them to tweak 1-2 things in your recruitment strategy over time.
Do you want the full guide on how to design a data-driven recruitment strategy? Download our comprehensive guide below.
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Data is a powerful way to measure performance and is present within most modern recruitment strategies. The growing popularity of applicant tracking systems (ATSs) has made it easier for those who do academic hiring to access data from their hiring process. However, not all universities have made this investment or use data to influence and adjust their overall strategy. There are other ways to get access to data without investing in an ATS, and this can be achieved through using partners or designing your own process.
In this piece, we’re going to outline the 6 benefits of a data-driven recruitment strategy, as well as provide you with a downloadable guide full of valuable insights (and a free template) so you can start tracking your recruitment data and using it to your advantage.
So, here are the top 6 benefits of data-driven recruitment:
Every recruitment team wants to find the best candidates on the market, and using data can help you increase candidate quality in two main ways. Firstly, you will be able to see clearly how many candidates you’re interviewing to make a hire, and secondly, you will be able to identify how many candidates make it through your interview process.
This will show whether you are screening candidates properly, thus increasing the quality of your hires.
Although hiring the best talent should be every institution’s goal, the candidate experience should be at the top of your priority list, too. Candidate experience not only shapes how your university or research institute is viewed by other institutions, but it can also affect whether candidates choose to accept the role you offer.
Candidate experience is crucial within academia, as highly sought-after candidates won’t just accept a position because it provides great career opportunities. A lot of the time, an individual will have to uproot their life to take a new position, so they’re interviewing you just as much as you’re interviewing them!
Although still considered new within academic recruitment, candidate feedback forms are an interesting way to improve the candidate experience overall. They often work on a simple 1-10 scoring system, which can allow you to see unanimous high or low scores in a particular area.
You can use this candidate feedback to improve or maintain parts of your hiring process. For example, the forms may show that candidates want to talk to HR or the international office during the interview process to understand the relocation services your institution offers international employees.
Whether you’re new to data-driven recruitment or you’re a seasoned pro looking for new KPIs to track, this guide will help you take your recruiting to the next level.
Recruitment can be stressful, regardless of whether you’re managing the whole process yourself or as part of a search committee. If you are managing the whole process yourself, data such as what interview stages are due to be complete, or what paperwork needs to be sent are simple but powerful data points to keep you organised.
Tracking these data points is equally as important when serving on or chairing a search committee. Having committee members log their progress in a centralised document, such as a spreadsheet, will help you stay organised.
Academic hiring is a notoriously long process and it’s not unusual for it to take months, or sometimes years to fill a vacancy. Tracking how many interview stages candidates are going through (and how long it takes them to get to the end of a process) could help you spot bottlenecks or opportunities to speed up the process, even by just a few days.
Don’t be disheartened if your time to hire doesn’t go down overnight, though – filling a research vacancy is a marathon, not a sprint! Instead, use this data point as a point of reference to come back to once a year and see if some positions have been filled quicker than others, or, where you may have rushed the process.
Hiring is expensive, especially if you choose to advertise beyond your university’s careers page. A data-driven recruitment approach might show you that certain advertising channels are inflating your cost per hire without delivering promising candidates. For example, advertising in a local paper or academic journal is costly, and the ROI of this exposure is difficult to measure. By tracking the sources of your candidates and hires, you can see which channels give you your money’s worth.
You may find that certain advertising partners or job boards are consistently yielding the best ROI, meaning you can become laser-focused with your budget, rather than putting it into multiple “pots” instead!
Although data doesn’t allow you to remove bias completely from the hiring process, it allows you to focus on facts and figures rather than opinions and intuition. If you are conscious about Diversity & Inclusion, tracking, for example, the number of female vs male candidates will allow you to see potential bias, as well as overall trends in female applicants and female hires. Universities are naturally keen to increase the representation of women in all academic roles, so you can use this data to then align your interview process accordingly!
In conclusion, a data-driven recruitment strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, it can be three or four points you measure that will undoubtedly benefit you in the future.
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RMIT University’s Vietnam presence was established in 2000, as a satellite campus of the well-known Australian university of technology, design, and enterprise. As Vietnam’s first international university campus, it is important that RMIT provides its students with an international community that supports their growth in an increasingly globalised world. We spoke to RMIT’s Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition Esther Walker, to learn more about how the university attracts international academic staff. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is your position at the university?
I’m the Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition for RMIT’s campuses in Vietnam. It’s myself and a team of five staff who basically recruit for all the positions at the university campuses in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Danang. We hire academics, professionals, and English educators. We’re a busy team. If you consider recruitment related roles as having peaks and troughs, we experience mainly peaks.
Why are internationalism and researcher mobility so important for the university?
It provides a diversity in culture in the university. We’re an Australian university, so we follow the Australian education framework which grants Australian accredited qualifications upon completion of undergraduate and postgraduate MBA and PhD studies. We think a diversity of staff and a really multicultural environment is very important. There’s a lot of emphasis placed on effective mobility and it’s quite an extensive process to recruit and onboard expatriates. There’s a lot of processes to go through with regards to work permits, visas, relocation and, over the past 12 months, quarantine requirements.
When you look at the faculty, are there a lot of faculty that come from Australia, being already familiar with the education system?
We do have a significant number of Australian academics, faculty members, and professional staff from other universities in Australia. We also have many staff from the UK and the US. There’s a familiarity with the foreign education systems, contemporary approaches to learning and teaching, and an important focus on industry engagement to build and support the employability of students once they have graduated.
I would say our workforce is 64% locals and 36% expatriates, and our expatriate staff come from over 30 different countries globally. I thought that I’d previously worked for a multicultural organisation when I worked in Australia, but then I came to RMIT’s Vietnam campuses, and it’s clear that we are a truly multicultural and diverse workforce.
Looking at your careers page it’s clear that some of the benefits you offer are organised in a way to be very enticing for international staff, like salary packaging of school fees, flexible working, location support, language classes, and great health insurance. What are some of the other ways that you recruit expatriates to the university?
We advertise on international academic job boards. We also use social media and rely on connections and networks of our staff, because Vietnam is perhaps not as well-known as a popular location for expatriates to relocate to, and some of the disciplines that we want to attract for our academic and professional roles are rather niche.
Ultimately, what I’ve found through discussions with staff, is that their motivation to join us isn’t purely based on the salary and benefits. As staff retention is a big ‘must’ for us, we want our staff to see our university as a good career move. We have a number of staff, local and expat, who have been with us for a long time. It was our 20-year anniversary last year and through employee recognition awards, we celebrated staff who have been here for 10, 15 and 20 years. I think offering other benefits such as supporting people with dependents to study at the university, pathways to professional and personal development, and flexible working, strengthens the brand of the university and the image of our campuses as world class international branches.
If you were going to then offer advice to a university that’s looking to diversify their staff more, where would you say to start? What are some of the focus areas?
To draw international staff, I think you need to be able to hire an experienced and agile HR workforce, and appoint key specialised staff who can support the entire employee lifecycle. You need HR experts, strong leaders with people management skills, talent managers, and organisational development, employee relations and compensation and benefits specialists.
In terms of retention, we are constantly looking at how we can be better and add more value. How can we strengthen our brand? How can we develop talent? How can we enhance the candidate experience? That’s our focus over the next five years because ultimately it will affect retention, which can have a knock-on effect in so many ways, across the organisation.
Reputation also plays a vital role in international recruitment. There are other universities in Vietnam, other international universities that are said to be competitors but RMIT is so established, it will take quite some time to catch up. We’re in our 21st year now, with a strong reputation in Vietnam; we’ve built credibility in the country and connected with industry. It makes us so well-known and that it gives us a lot of a lot of strength in terms of the brand and attracting students and staff to come and work here. As such, building reputation and providing quality support is my advice.
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