There’s a new website called Cladwell that essentially serves as a personal shopper for men buying clothes. It’s pretty cool.

Cladwell asks you seven questions, including your body shape, hair color, if you prefer fashion over function and your budget, and then it recommends clothes from around the web. So if you are 5’10” and prefer function over fashion and don’t want to spend a lot of money, they’ll recommend you some comfortable, cheap outfits from stores that will fit well.

The concept of Cladwell is a perfect representation of where the economy is headed. Today, companies are working to make their experience as personalized as possible for the consumer, from targeted ads to allowing users to stream content anywhere through a variety of devices to even an increased push for flexible pricing plans.

Human resource teams and recruiters can use this effective marketing technique to win their own ongoing war for talent. And that means writing job postings in a way that is personalized for the type of people they’re trying to recruit.

What That Means

Job postings cannot be personalized for each person who see them, they are what they are to whoever sees them (even if it is possible to personalize it, it probably isn’t a good idea). Instead, it should be personalized to the type of person you are trying to recruit.

A perfect example is this ad by the United States Air Force:

This posting is great for two reasons – one, it is memorable and it is going to get a lot of attention. Second, it is going to attract the exact type of person the Air Force is looking for their engineering program – obviously, people who love math and love solving problems.

Here’s another perfect example by a company that is looking for school bus drivers:

This one is great for three reasons. Like the Air Force example, it is memorable. Like the Air Force example, it is very attractive to the people the bus company is looking for – parents (presumably because they know how to deal with children and care about those children) looking to make some extra cash.

Thirdly, who is going to see these ads the most? Parents, at the bus stop as they send their children off to school, the exact people the bus company is looking to recruit. That’s the very definition of a personalized job posting.

The Takeaway

Most job postings are carbon copies of each other. A brief description of the company, a brief description of the job and then the requirements.

Yawn.

Companies can gain a competitive advantage by taking some time to figure out the type of people they are trying to recruit (an essential aspect of hiring well) and then writing a post around that. Marvel does this, as an example, and that’s part of the reason they have the edge right now over their main competitor, DC.

Most job postings today are boilerplate: brief paragraph explaining the company on top, followed by a description of the position and then a long list of requirements. They are unmemorable, clunky to read and produce boilerplate candidates.

A job posting tailored to a specific type of person with a specific type of skills is going to produce a specific set of candidates. That’s going to improve your quality-of-hire, the most critical aspect to successfully growing an organization.

About VoiceGlance

VoiceGlance is a cloud-based hiring tool used by forward-thinking companies to hire smarter, instead of harder. Learn more here.