Unconscious or conscious racism, ageism and sexism have a habit of creeping into job descriptions and Job Ads and consequently can have a significant impact on the recruitment process, resulting in a lack of diversity in the workplace and in your teams.
We all intuitively know and data demonstrate universally that the more diverse your workforce is – when it comes to age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation and gender – the better your organisation will perform.
A wide range of viewpoints and experiences enhances the workplace while bringing benefits – increased creativity and productivity, anyone? – to your company.
So where to start? Fortunately for you, Get-Optimal – a UK based global technology company and diversity and inclusion provider whose core product is job ad optimisation – has the technology, expertise and experience to remove bias from your job description, ensuring you find the perfect new addition to your newly decentralised team.
Daniel Fellows, founder and CEO of Get-Optimal explained: “Without a doubt, word choices impact the application pool. Masculine adjectives like ‘competitive’ and ‘determined’ tend to put women off applying, while ‘softer’ words such as ‘cooperative’ and ‘collaborative’ invariably attract more women.”
He continued: “At Get-Optimal, we have a gender debias tool pulled from open APIs built into our core product. It analyses up to 16 different inputs ranging from coded language, gendered words and gendered pronouns and removes these subtle and unconscious biases from all of your job ads.
”However, removing bias at the source is the first step of six key steps. Of the job ads we analyse globally, 98 per cent are masculine coded and thereby only appeal to male candidates. That’s not good enough, is it? Words, bullet points, commas and phrases shouldn’t push qualified people away from applying.”
But while the wording of job listings should begin with mitigating bias, DE&I (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) is just one component of optimising job adverts.
If you want your Job Ad to appear and get increased visibility in search engine results – and let’s face it, in today’s internet-dependent world that’s all of us – it needs to be keyword rich. Be sure to integrate words or phrases commonly used by job seekers in your industry into the job title and description for best SEO practice. A Job Ad is 90 percent science, 10 percent human intervention.
An effective Job Advertisement is also brief, clear and to the point. You can achieve much of this by proofreading (twice) your ads and avoiding over-formatting. Case in point?
Of course, you need to catch the attention of job hunters and set your vacancy apart from the rest of the job pool, but this should be done through creative copy-crafting that provides a behind-the-scenes snapshot of your company, an appealing (optimised) title and by listing the employee benefits. Always include empathy, would you apply to this role?
By now you're probably wondering just how optimised your Job Advert really is – which is where the Get-Optimal job advert scoring tool comes in. Our free to use scoring tool analyses your humble job ad on content and engagement, gender bias, SEO, accessibility, social mobility and diversity and inclusion – and then we can see how we can help you optimise your job adverts.
Drafting a Job Advert to find the right candidate can be a daunting and difficult experience but, with our help, they’ll find you. With an increase in the quality of candidates, you’ll have a diverse talent pool to choose from to help grow your business.
Daniel Fellows
CEO
Get-Optimal.com
Unconscious or conscious racism, ageism and sexism have a habit of creeping into job descriptions and Job Ads and consequently can have a significant impact on the recruitment process, resulting in a lack of diversity in the workplace and in your teams.
We all intuitively know and data demonstrate universally that the more diverse your workforce is – when it comes to age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation and gender – the better your organisation will perform.
A wide range of viewpoints and experiences enhances the workplace while bringing benefits – increased creativity and productivity, anyone? – to your company.
So where to start? Fortunately for you, Get-Optimal – a UK based global technology company and diversity and inclusion provider whose core product is job ad optimisation – has the technology, expertise and experience to remove bias from your job description, ensuring you find the perfect new addition to your newly decentralised team.
Daniel Fellows, founder and CEO of Get-Optimal explained: “Without a doubt, word choices impact the application pool. Masculine adjectives like ‘competitive’ and ‘determined’ tend to put women off applying, while ‘softer’ words such as ‘cooperative’ and ‘collaborative’ invariably attract more women.”
He continued: “At Get-Optimal, we have a gender debias tool pulled from open APIs built into our core product. It analyses up to 16 different inputs ranging from coded language, gendered words and gendered pronouns and removes these subtle and unconscious biases from all of your job ads.
”However, removing bias at the source is the first step of six key steps. Of the job ads we analyse globally, 98 per cent are masculine coded and thereby only appeal to male candidates. That’s not good enough, is it? Words, bullet points, commas and phrases shouldn’t push qualified people away from applying.”
But while the wording of job listings should begin with mitigating bias, DE&I (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) is just one component of optimising job adverts.
If you want your Job Ad to appear and get increased visibility in search engine results – and let’s face it, in today’s internet-dependent world that’s all of us – it needs to be keyword rich. Be sure to integrate words or phrases commonly used by job seekers in your industry into the job title and description for best SEO practice. A Job Ad is 90 percent science, 10 percent human intervention.
An effective Job Advertisement is also brief, clear and to the point. You can achieve much of this by proofreading (twice) your ads and avoiding over-formatting. Case in point?
Of course, you need to catch the attention of job hunters and set your vacancy apart from the rest of the job pool, but this should be done through creative copy-crafting that provides a behind-the-scenes snapshot of your company, an appealing (optimised) title and by listing the employee benefits. Always include empathy, would you apply to this role?
By now you're probably wondering just how optimised your Job Advert really is – which is where the Get-Optimal job advert scoring tool comes in. Our free to use scoring tool analyses your humble job ad on content and engagement, gender bias, SEO, accessibility, social mobility and diversity and inclusion – and then we can see how we can help you optimise your job adverts.
Drafting a Job Advert to find the right candidate can be a daunting and difficult experience but, with our help, they’ll find you. With an increase in the quality of candidates, you’ll have a diverse talent pool to choose from to help grow your business.
Daniel Fellows
CEO
Get-Optimal.com
