Some businesses think of job descriptions as contracts. They list all the things a worker should do. And, then, they add, “Other duties as assigned.” It’s a “job as a checklist” culture. It creates a manager-employee relationship that only encourages workers to say of a task, “It’s not my job.” But, times have changed. Modern workers don’t live to work. They prefer to work to support a life-work balance. They want jobs that interest and satisfy them and that let them pursue their dreams. It sounds like a lot. They don’t always get what they want. But, businesses that value talent recruit differently than they have in the past.

‍Millennial Expectations

‍Millennials represent the largest segment of the working population. Punit Renjen, chief executive officer, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, writing for The Wall Street Journal, reported on survey results identifying factors millennials want to see in an employer.

• 75% feel businesses believe a sense of purpose should drive the pursuit of profit.
• 77% of those who are heavy users of social media say, where there is a strong sense of purpose, there is significantly greater financial and recruitment success and higher employee satisfaction.
• Even where millennials align with their companies’ leadership on the need to ensure the long-term future of the organization, they would place far greater emphasis on employee well-being, growth, and development.
• They place less emphasis on personal income and short-term financial goals but prioritize their companies’ contributions to local communities.
• Millennials believe an organization’s treatment of its employees is the most important consideration in determining whether a company can be considered a leader.

Considering that this generation is well-educated, advertising that addresses knowledge, skills, and abilities is pretty much-wasted money.

1. Take a Marketing Approach

‍You must sell your Job openings, even internal ones. It’s a supply and demand situation, and if you want talent, you must reach that niche market. Like any good marketing effort, you must know your buying customers. And, then you frame the content to appeal and engage. A contemporary Human Capital Management (HCM) system like ClayHR’s helps with recruit tracking, employee performance analysis, goal management, and smart asset management.

2. Lead with Your Unique Sales Proposition

Recruits are not looking for titles, like clerk, technician, engineer, analyst, and the like. They do want to know what’s different about you. Right or wrong, computer technicians believe they can always find a job, so they are looking for some company to offer a chance to enjoy, collaborate, and innovate. So, lead off with what’s new and fresh about your operation. Show them that you have a happy and satisfied team culture.

3. Offer a look at the Big Picture

Today’s recruits want involvement and belonging to a clear vision and mission. They need a picture of where their alignment will take them. Yours should be a place and culture in which they want to participate. If they don’t like the picture, they will save you the time of interviewing and qualifying them.

4. Offer Achievement

Any employee will want to advance. So, if your job has a career path, the ad should include it. Your market wants to sense there are paths that converge in the business’s success. Your ad should recognize the achievements of employees that also show how the company empowers them to innovate and co-create.

5. Appeal to Empathy

‍At best the ad should create a world where the recruit “feels” welcome and satisfied. For example, your website and social media presence should be more occupied with how the company performance supports the community than with explaining products and features. You need to communicate the “feel” for the business as “employer of choice.”

6. Talent is Behavior

‍Avoiding the checklists and bullets that label the skills or tasks of the job, you should favor the behaviors you want to see. The ad should identify what you need recruits to “do,” how they are expected to “act,” and what form their “contributions” will take.

7. Offer Challenges

‍Dialog on titles, compensation, and benefits come later. Your ad should offer the promise of challenges not barriers, opportunities, not hurdles, resources not effort. Millennials need space and freedom to move about, all tied to opportunity. Learn more tips on how to retain the millennials.

8. Talk to the Candidate

‍It’s a question of writing style. Using second-person pronouns (you, your, yourself), you can sustain a conversation, but direct address comes across as demanding.

9. Exploit Technology‍

If you want to optimize your reach, you need ads that work across media platforms. In terms of appearance and content, they must be effective on laptops, tablets, smartphones, and social media sites.

10. Start with your Website

‍The landing page for your corporate website must capture and communicate the culture in which people want to work. This means featuring vision, mission, community leadership, growth potential, and the business’s holistic approach to employee well-being. It also means have a click through to additional cultural issues like continuing education, childcare, and more. For instance, the Pepsico site opens with attention to “Who We Are” and “What We Believe.” Or, look at the Big Pharma site for Celgene which opens on issues of values and responsibility.

Forbes suggests, “think about how you can provide value to your followers and develop relationships. The more value you provide your audience and actually show how your brand, service, or product is the solution, the more traction you will see.”Writing such ads with brief and dynamic content is tough. If you favor active verbs, shorter words, and vivid adjectives, you are off to a good start. You must avoid adverbs and exaggeration. It might help to remember you are competing with gamification. Players like bells and whistles, points and badges. So, your challenge comes down to writing content that makes the promise vivid and tangible. Your task in writing engaging job posts it helping candidates see themselves at your work.