If your HR Department is like mine, you’re juggling everything from applicant sourcing to COBRA administration and all points in between.

So when you write a job posting that effectively describes the role and responsibilities, you feel like you’ve hit the jackpot and found the Holy Grail! And you use that same post and verbiage over and over … and over and over … and over and over.

And once more again for good measure.

Over time, however, even the best of job postings get stale. And if you keep doing the old copy/paste of the same verbiage over and over, you’re eventually going to see a dip in both the quality and quantity of applicants for your positions. Why?

• Applicants don’t read. We’ve heard over and over that recruiters and hiring managers only spend 5 – 10 seconds looking at applications. Well, applicants aren’t spending much more time looking at the jobs they’re applying to, either. They spend about 15 – 20 seconds reading job postings. So if you’re not updating your postings, you’ll end up with lots of duplicate applicants who either won’t remember applying before or will apply again because they don’t think you saw them the first time.

 

• Applicants know you’re not serious. Whether it is your career site or a job board, the serious seeker sees when you’re using the same posting again and again without changing anything. When applicants see that you’re not serious enough about your postings to make routine adjustments, they think you’re not serious about your job requirements. So if you’re not updating your postings, you’ll end up with under-qualified and/or long-shot applicants who think their annoyance persistence might just pay off.

 

• Applicants are perceptive. Remember, while you’re screening someone for that opening in your company, that someone is also screening you. When applicants see that you’re postings are routinely recycled, they wonder what kind of organization they’d be working for. How can you legitimately claim to be forward-thinking, innovative and cutting-edge if you haven’t updated your job post wording in over a year or more? If you want to attract top talent but you’re not updating your postings, you’ll end up running off those high performing applicants who think you won’t be able to further develop their talents.

Don’t cause open jobs to linger longer and hurt your talent pool by using stale job postings. If you’re not yielding the applicants that you want and need, it’s probably time to update that old faithful job posting with some fresh new wording.