It’s Time to Write Better Job Descriptions

Job descriptions have long been an effective tool for recruiting qualified employees to a company, but they must be consistently maintained and updated. In addition to updating language to reflect new responsibilities or company vision, a total formatting overhaul may be necessary to ensure your dealership is catching the attention of today’s top talent. In large part, this means ensuring your job descriptions are tailored toward millennials. 

In fact, a Harvard Business Review study notes that as much as 80 percent of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions, and replacing an employee will cost a company an average of two times the person’s salary. Furthermore, one of the top reasons for hiring the wrong employee is creating job descriptions that fail to attract the right candidates for a specific position.

Millennials are increasingly making up more of the auto industry workforce and customer base, so dealerships must devote the time and resources to attracting these candidates.

No matter the position, the below guidelines will help your dealership write the kind of job descriptions that will appeal to the best-suited candidates. Simply:

Focus on What You Can Do for Them  

Potential employees are evaluating your dealership just as much as you are evaluating their credentials. Because qualified candidates know what they will be bringing to the table, they want to know what your company can offer them in return. Emphasize the ways in which your dealership can take care of them to provide them with the incentive to apply for your position. And don’t just allude to your company’s “amazing benefits,” get into specifics and highlight the perks your dealership provides to get them excited to become a part of your team. For example, does your company offer a defined career path and training program, stable pay plans, lunch on weekends, annual bonuses, childcare or paid parental leave? The right candidates will appreciate a company that will benefit their lives, not just their work.

Focus on Where Your Company is Going, Not Where Its Been

While candidates evaluate the ways in which your position will play into their overall lives, they are still very much interested in opportunities for advancement and growth within your company, as well. A dealership with an impressive founding story and history is certainly a plus, but today’s candidates want to know where a company sees itself going, and what role they will be playing in helping achieve that. This is the time to call out any company-wide initiatives, recent innovations or expansions, to demonstrate to potential candidates where they will fit in to your company’s future.

Run Descriptions by People in the Actual Position

You may have a single person or small team crafting job descriptions for a number of positions within your dealership, but once they have been drafted be sure to run them by employees currently working in those specific roles. This will help determine if the requirements and responsibilities listed are accurate and reasonable. They will be able to confirm what skills are required, which may be “nice-to-haves” and which are unnecessary, or even unrealistic. Failure to outline accurate and reasonable responsibilities and skills will risk alienating the best candidates and potentially attract the wrong candidates to your pool of applicants.

Focus on the Keywords

Putting together a great job description will yield little results if interested candidates cannot find you. Remember that they are most likely searching for a position that matches their skills, rather than searching for open positions within your dealership. They are also most likely searching online. By including appropriate keywords in your descriptions matching those your candidates are likely searching for, you increase your odds of being found in their job search.

Start the process by first choosing the best job title. To get an idea for what people are searching, consider using Google’s Keyword Planner to help rank higher in search engines. Once the most relevant title has been determined, optimize the full job description with keywords that will help your ideal candidates find you. Avoid “marketing fluff” and empty buzzwords to jazz-up your description without adding any value. Instead, focus on employing long-tailed keywords. These keywords are specific search phrases consisting of three or more words offering low competition, low search volume and high searcher intent. 

Crafting your job descriptions through the eyes of your ideal candidate will increase your dealership’s chances of attracting the right talent to your growing team. And by consistently maintaining those descriptions with updates as necessary, you will continue speaking to your target audience in a language they are sure to understand and respond to.