Evergreen jobs offer convenience to hiring teams that advertise for the same job over and over. Some hiring teams believe that creating one candidate pool in an applicant tracking system (e.g., Workday, SmartRecruiters) is a benefit. However, leaving jobs open creates problems. Here are three reasons to close them.
Some hiring teams use evergreen jobs for positions that they hire for again and again. Rather than create a new job posting every time, these teams can just leave the job posting open. However, evergreen jobs don’t appear on job boards, they can turn off candidates who don’t get a response, and they wreck recruiting analytics.
1. Evergreen jobs don’t show up on job boards
Job board search engines attempt to provide a good search experience for job seekers. Part of that good search experience is listing newly opened jobs at the top of the results and pushing old jobs down to the bottom.
It’s easy to see why evergreen jobs can be problematic. The longer they’re open, the farther down the search results they go. In a short time, your job posting becomes all but invisible to job seekers.
2. They can turn off applicants who don’t get a response
Imagine a job seeker comes across your job posting (after exhaustive scrolling down the search results). Imagine the job excites them and they apply. Then imagine how they feel waiting for weeks or months without getting a response because you aren’t currently in a hiring cycle.
Candidates quickly tire of job boards full of ‘phantom’ jobs that aren’t really open, are only open for legal reasons, or seem tailored to a ‘unicorn’ candidate.
Receiving no response or even a timeline of when to expect one can put job seekers off. If they don’t feel like your company is interested, they’ll turn to other companies that have shown interest.
3. Evergreen jobs are recruiting analytics killers
Recruiting analytics can tell you how well your jobs and your talent pipeline as a whole are performing. However, evergreen jobs are a major impediment to recruiting analytics.
Because they stay open, evergreen jobs don’t offer an end-to-end view of each round of hiring. You can’t see how many applicants went through a particular hiring round or even whether a round resulted in a hire. It’s also impossible to gauge cost per hire.
You need full pipeline data to measure your hiring efforts, which means clear metrics on every stage of a job’s hiring process. Those metrics can tell you not only how many women applied, but how many women applied, received an interview, and got an offer.
If you see candidates dropping out after the phone interview phase, for instance, it could mean you have issues in your phone interview process. If you have a healthy gender breakdown throughout the hiring process for a certain department but no female candidates receive an offer, you can address it thanks to clear data points. Clear recruiting analytics enable you to see where you’re doing well and where you’re not.
Close your evergreen jobs
Evergreen jobs are convenient, but they’re more trouble than they’re worth. They’re all but invisible on job board searches. They can turn off job seekers who don’t receive a response. And, because they don’t offer clear metrics, they’re also recruiting analytics killers. Our advice? Avoid them.