Are you overstating job requirements?

Are you focusing on the wrong thing in your job requirements?

Look, in the healthcare space, hiring good people is vital to sustain and grow your business.

To attract good people, you need to attract good candidates to your job. 

The problem is that most employers do it the wrong way.

When they decide they’re going to hire somebody new and start to write their job ad, they focus on what they want. 

They make a list of the duties that this person is going to be doing each day. They make a list of qualifications that in their head they think the job seeker would need to have to be good at the job and then they post it on job boards. 

It ends up sounding like a bank robber hired a lawyer to write their list of demands. It’s very focused on the employer and their needs but gives nothing to the job seeker.

It’s a job description outlining your desires rather than a job ad that markets to the desires of good candidates. 

To be honest, the majority of the time, requirements are overstated or even outright wrong. This leads to scaring good candidates away and instead, attracting the wrong ones.

So how do you change your job requirements to attract good candidates?

Simply put, instead of focusing on what this new hire needs to be capable of, focus on a person that you want to clone. 

When you have a job opening at your company, ask yourself…

“Who do I know, preferably someone that works for me already, that would be perfect for this job?” 

Once you know that person, think of who this person has become, but also what they looked like from a resume standpoint when they got hired to work in the position they’re in now.

What you’ll find is that this employee may not have had the education or the experience you thought they had or thought they needed to make them successful in the job. Instead, they’ve grown into that person. 

Your list of requirements should be built around…

“What was it about this person when we hired them that ended up making them successful in the job?” 

Your list of duties shouldn’t be a list of things you need this person to do, but rather a story explaining what the average workday will look like. 

Ask those in that current position, especially if they’re who you want to clone…

“What do you do every day?”, “What don’t you do that you thought you would do in this job?” and so forth. 

Create a day in the life so the job seeker knows what it entails before they even apply. 

Because what predicts if someone is a good candidate or not is whether that person, their personality, their resume, and what they want out of the job are similar to the person you want to clone. 

Because remember, “if you could hire someone like Joe, you would hire 100 of him.” 

So why not do what you need to do to attract him?

If you don’t know where to begin or need help writing that engaging job ad...

Let me know, I’d be happy to help.