Women held 50.04% of American jobs as of December, excluding farm workers and the self-employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s up from 49.7% just one year ago and companies find that more female employees ensures higher job satisfaction, organizational commitment and decreased burnout. To hire more women you have to start with a thorough look at your job descriptions and job posting tactics.
You may not realize that from the start your job posting could be deterring women from applying. When women look for jobs they tend to take themselves out of the running before even applying if they think that they do not meet every requirement listed on the job description.
Start attracting women through your job posting by focusing on performance objectives of the role and what accomplishments are for the job instead of a laundry list of qualifications. Men will apply even if they don’t meet all the qualifications, while women will closely compare their qualifications to you list and may take themselves out of the running.
What do you want – performance or a checklist of qualification? This will not only provide women with a more realistic idea of the job but open it up to more applicants in general. If you must keep requirements, look to select the real “must-haves” for the job and eliminate all other requirements.
Job description language matters a lot as well. Make sure that you are using gender neutral language in the posting to increase candidate applications. Harvard found that 44 percent of women would not apply to a job offer if the description included the word “aggressive.” A lot of words can have gender language bias some masculine words that companies are looking to stay away from include lead, driving, proven, workforce, strong, determined and drive.
Changing the job description is the first step to attracting more women. The second step is figuring out how to reach them. Just posting your job, no longer yields the results that you need to attract diverse, qualified candidates. Circa has more than 1,800 community partners that are focused on women including partners focused on:
Learn more about our Diversity Recruiting Solution to see how your job postings can start to reach more women in the community today!
