Want to Attract Remote Workers? Here’s How to Write Work-From-Home Job Ads for Your Business
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Hiring remote employees can add a huge benefit to your business, especially if don’t operate out of one central location, or if the specific skillset for your industry is scarce in your area. In this day and age, remote work can also have an immense benefit for employees who want to provide their working knowledge to a company, but can’t necessarily relocate. But attracting remote workers comes with its own set of challenges, mainly in how you as the employer advertise the position and convey the expectations of a completely digitally-based job. If you don’t know where to start, we’ve got your back.
If you’ve been asking yourself how to attract remote workers, you need to think about all the steps of your recruiting process first. Organic work-from-home jobs can be more difficult for job seekers to find right now, as many companies who had previously converted on-site jobs to remote positions during the pandemic (especially in certain industries that can be done from a laptop pretty much anywhere) requiring workers to return to the office, or at a very least a hybrid model. But if your company is one of many creating positions that are designated as virtual from day one, you need to know how to market it.
Think about the job advertisements for this position — what keywords do you think remote job seekers are searching for, what aspects of the job will they want to know off the bat from your description? If you can set expectations up front, you’ll get candidates who are a better fit for the position. Posting on job boards like ZipRecruiter make it even easier for job seekers to filter results and find remote and work-from-home jobs.
Read ahead for the best tips on how to effectively recruit and hire remote employees, all while working online.
1. Use Keywords to Draw Attention to Your Listing
Optimizing your job postings with keywords and phrases is important not only so that your listing will show up on the relevant online searches, but so your posting will be seen by as many relevant candidates as possible. While you may think that going broad in your job title and description will yield higher views, it pays to be specific in key areas of the listing so that only job seekers who are looking for remote work and with relevant experience in their field will apply.
One way to do this is to go general in the job title, such as “Sales Manager (Remote)” instead of “Work-From-Home Retail Sales Expert,” but get specific in the actual description itself in terms of remote job-related duties, scheduling expectations, necessary skill sets, and tools. Check to see if your job posting site has customizable templates to help with this.
2. Join Job Posting Sites with Online Hiring Tools
To find the most qualified remote candidates, make it easier on yourself and create a listing through job posting sites. You’ll want to look for job search sites that offer premium services on the business end that you can use to filter for the necessary qualifications, handle the interview process online, and have a resume database at your fingertips to find the right candidate no matter where they’re based out of.
There are hundreds of sites to choose from that cater to remote listings, like FlexJobs and RemoteOK, but one particularly helpful site is ZipRecruiter, which offers customizable templates for job descriptions, different positions, and screener questions that simplify the processes of posting listings, so you can get them up quickly and hire remote employees in no time.
There’s two plans available, a Standard and Premium job listing plan. While they don’t list their official pricing online, the Standard plan is for more budget-friendly hiring, and will give you distribution to 100+ job sites, unlimited candidate applications, and one reusable job slot. Before you start looking over your qualified candidates, you can always try this #1 rated hiring site free with ZipRecruiter’s free trial plan.
3. Adapt Your Listing for Social Media
Social media is actually where a good chunk of remote job seekers are being hired from nowadays, so you’ll want to craft a listing that reads just as well on a job board site as it will on social media. Make sure to post current job openings on your social media feeds, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and link out to your company’s page for applications. You can narrow your search for the most relevant candidates by posting the job to specific professional groups for your field, or groups for job seekers looking for remote work.
There are also tools, like ZipRecruiter‘s “TrafficBoost,” that give your job posting a little extra boost, including increased placement and visibility across their linked job boards. TrafficBoost helps secure more eyeballs too without purely relying on your SEO skills, since the tool will promote the position until it receives the number of views you’re aiming for (100-300 views per post), or for up to 30 days.
4. Ensure Your Brand Has an Accurate Online Presence
One of the best ways to be proactive about hiring remote workers online is by managing your company’s reputation and digital presence. Local candidates will always be easier to reach, but for remote workers, they’ll have to rely on first impressions from your digital presence to learn about your company. Sites like Glassdoor offer analytical tools that help determine who your target market is, candidate demographics, and how potential candidates are engaging with your job listings.
You can use all this information to your advantage to tailor your brand’s profile and your job listings with specific keywords (“remote work-friendly” or “remote positions”), and even use social media to your advantage. Many job boards too will let you add-on targeted advertising to display your job posting with the right kind of messaging (i.e. mentioning the job is hiring remotely, completely online, etc).
5. Make Sure the Entire Application Process Can Be Handled Virtually
In your job advertisement, for all the steps involved in the application process, you should make it explicitly clear that all the steps will be handled virtually. If there’s a skills test, can it be transferred online? Do you have a method for scheduling phone interviews, and does your company have a preferred video conferencing software?
That being said, if you mention in the listing that your interview process is still extensive despite being online, and that might turn away potential employees who are applying remotely. But there are still passive ways to bring the candidates to you — ZipRecruiter uses a powerful matching algorithm and AI technology to create instant matches between your listings and the right candidates. It takes information about a job seeker’s skills (such as education, skills, and experience) and connects all kinds of businesses, including yours, with millions of potential applicants currently on the web.
