According to a recently released market share breakdown, Workday Recruiting is now the most used applicant tracking system by Fortune 500 companies, taking 22.6% of the vote.

As Workday continues to be a top ATS, we at Boss ERP feel this is a good opportunity to look over the key areas that you need to optimise when recruiting with Workday.

Get The Text Right

When you’re looking to attract the best candidates to your role, you’re often only a couple of words away from reeling them in or repelling them altogether – and that’s why it’s important to use a text analyser on your job descriptions. It’s a useful tool that will correct any biases in your job advert, and make sure you’re attracting the right people.

For example, words such as share, together, feel, interpersonal and understanding are some of the top words used in roles which are looking to attract women, whereas words such as strong, drive, lead, proven and decisions are some of the top words used to draw in male applicants.

Improve Your Readability

Getting the readability of your job descriptions/adverts right is thought to increase their effectiveness. The key is to keep your job adverts as readable and understandable as possible – the best candidates are busy, and will spend less than 10 seconds reading a text-based job ad.

Using a text analyser will help you to write you job roles in the most attractive way possible:

• Use shorter sentences
• Use shorter words
• Reduce the use of adverbs
• Use first and second person – we, our, you, your
• Make sure you get the opening paragraph just right – this is where you’ll either win or lose the person reading your advert

Don’t Try To Be Creative With Job Titles

As much as you might want to promote your employer brand and show candidates that you’re cool, quirky and a fun place to work – nobody will see your job advert if you give it an irrelevant title.

The job title is the first thing the candidate sees, and they’re usually going to searching for pretty specific job titles. For example, if you’re looking for someone to help with admin, you’d get more interest and engagement with a post titled ‘admin assistant’ than you would if it was titled ‘chief organiser’ – and you could be missing out on a host of talented candidates because you’ve tried to be creative!

Get Rid Of Any Bias

In today’s quickly changing world, more and more people are either supporting or identifying with gender neutrality, and by removing any gender bias from your job descriptions and enabling candidates to feel that they’re all on an even playing field, you could be attracting your perfect candidate.

Here’s a short overview which can help you to keep your job ads neutral:

• Personal pronouns: Use ‘their’ and not ‘his/her’
• Avoid using ‘men’ or ‘women’ and use ‘people’
• Instead of using ‘maternity’ or ‘paternity’, use ‘parental time off’
• Don’t specifically talk about ‘mums’ or ‘dads’, but use ‘parent’

By implementing even just a few of these tips into your job description, you’ll be eliminating gender bias and opening yourself up to a real variety of candidates! It’s thought that the reason for Workday Recruiting’s market share growth is largely due to its reputation within the financial software world, with many CEOs turning to Workday to provide solutions when needed – for example, HR, payroll and now recruitment.

If you’re using Workday as your ATS, we hope that the tips above will help you to get the most out of the software, and that you’ll have a flood talented candidates engaging with your jod adverts.