In today’s competitive job market, creating standardized job posts primes you to attract top talent and deliver a fair and inclusive hiring process. However, as Talent Operations leaders will attest, standardization is challenging. Headwinds such as multiple writers, location/role-specific EVP and regulatory standards, and a lack of automation to standardize work and track compliance add complexity to creating a sustainable solution. To address this, Datapeople’s platform embraces the centralization of job templates. With effective job templates, companies will be primed to hire the talent they seek efficiently and equitably.
For many global leaders, creating effective job templates unlocks sustainable hiring outcomes, including greater efficiency and more inclusive hiring. They also position you to consistently and authentically represent your EVP and hiring compliance standards.
Datapeople recently hosted a Job Template Best Practices Workshop, this blog post will distill the essence of the conversation. During this session, Amit, Co-founder of Datapeople, and Bridgette, Solutions Engineer, offered invaluable insights on building and leveraging effective job templates.
The elements of an effective job template
While each company’s effective job template might appear different, they share the same essential elements. Follow these themes to put yourself on the path to developing your authentic, effective job templates.
1. Employer value proposition (EVP)
In today’s competitive market, an organization’s Employer Value Proposition (EVP) plays a crucial role in attracting top talent. Amit emphasized that EVP should be consistently reflected in job templates, ensuring it is represented to the candidates at every touchpoint—whether they’re viewing the job on a careers page or platforms like LinkedIn.
A successful EVP isn’t one-size-fits-all. It varies across roles and regions. Amit stressed the need to integrate it into dynamic templates that can adapt to different roles, ensuring a seamless candidate experience. He outlined four critical aspects of an EVP that should be baked into your hiring: candidate-first language, flexibility across departments, strong enforcement, and ongoing measurement of its impact.
For organizations with multiple brands or divisions, template customization is key. Amit discussed the benefits of using sub-branded templates for companies that operate across sectors or locations. Consumer companies, for instance, might need different templates for retail versus corporate roles. Having specific templates for high-volume positions can also help streamline the hiring process, reducing the burden on hiring teams.
2. Candidate-friendly structure
A well-structured job post (aka job ad) can make or break your hiring efforts. With candidates spending just 10–15 seconds scanning job ads, Amit explained that presenting key information quickly is vital. Candidates skim for details that matter to them. So be sure they can easily identify job title, location, benefits, and qualifications. Poorly structured, lengthy jobs can lead to a flood of unqualified candidates, especially with the rise of one-click apply tools.
Amit advised focusing on job-centric content, with around 50% dedicated to job responsibilities and 15-20% to company information, benefits, and perks. Effective job templates offer a sustainable means to help your team adopt this approach. Ensuring that they are building, and you are publishing, an advertisement to join your company, not a jargon-filled job description.
3. Writer-accessible, role relevant
Bridgette shared that 35% of Datapeople customers have between 5-10 standardized job templates. These are often segmented by brand, department, role type, or geography. Many of these templates embrace locked sections for consistent content (i.e., company description and benefits) while leaving other parts, like specific job duties, open for customization. This approach minimizes the work a writer has to do to create a job while promoting alignment across business units.
Datapeople’s Template Library ensures that administrators can easily create, store, and manage a variety of job templates tailored to specific business needs. To drive improved compliance with templates, Bridgette highlighted Datapeople’s commenting capabilities. By adding comments directly into the template, an admin can more effectively guide a writer while reducing the risk of placeholder text sneaking into a published job post.
4. Regularly reviewed and maintained
Templates aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Both Amit and Bridgette stressed the importance of regular reviews to ensure templates are embraced, compliant, and relevant.
Tracking usage will help you assess whether your team believes a template positions them for greater hiring success. However, usage only tells half of the story. Be sure to measure key performance indicators by each template to understand their true effectiveness. Finally, it is critical to conduct quarterly template audits, to ensure your templates align with updated hiring regulations and remain competitive in your markets. This is especially crucial for large organizations with multiple subdivisions, to keep content fresh and aligned with candidate expectations.
Effective job templates power sustained success
In today’s competitive market, hiring is difficult enough. Target talent has never felt more available and yet unavailable. Complexity is further magnified with lean talent teams who are also expected to be more efficient and effective. To help teams thrive in this new normal, the best companies have turned to effective job templates. These effective job templates help them effortlessly secure hiring success across brands, divisions, role types, and even writers.
Are you curious about their path? Let a Datapeople Talent Operations Specialist help illuminate it by requesting a demo.