How can you attract more and better applicants by changing the job advertisement? A research team investigated this question in a study last year. The study setting was unusually realistic: not in the laboratory, but in real day-to-day recruiting at a large semiconductor company. The result is highly relevant for human resources departments: Even the targeted highlighting of individual job characteristics in job advertisements changes who applies – and in some cases also how good the applications are.
In the study “How can you attract talent? Practical results to emphasize flexibility and career opportunities in job advertisements” (translated from English, editor’s note) from the University of Cologne, a location of an anonymized technology group with around 3,000 employees is examined. The group employs around 60,000 people worldwide. The location examined is in a rural region in Germany. The job advertisements in question were primarily looking for skilled workers from the MINT sector, i.e. from natural sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics. This is exactly where the competition for talent is particularly fierce.
