If you own a law firm or manage a corporate legal department, you may need to hire people from time to time; at the same time, when you struggle with cut throat competition for clients, you have to face fierce competition in hiring the right candidates for job openings in your legal concern.
While 'www' is cluttered with general job boards, there was a need of a niche job board catering only to legal jobs; soon most of the legal concerns transferred their accounts to such legal jobs portals, but, was that sufficient? The answer is no, because while these job portals were flourishing, the lucrative and rewarding jobs were stuck in middle of common threads running through all the bad job ads. Now was the need to sell your firm name well on these job boards; some opted for paying for featured jobs, while others compromised by hiring less-qualified legal professionals. But, there is a way in-between, that is realized by just a few, where you don't have to pay more and you can optimize your legal posts so that the best talent in the market can reach your job posting in time.
Here are a few legal job posting tips that will interest the right type of candidates while discouraging unqualified applicants:
1) Sell Your Legal Concern: Too often law firms don't mention advantages and benefits of working in their company, if you don't do this you simply lose advantage over competition. The first step towards building a brand in job portals is to tell your prospects why they should join your legal concern, whether its growth opportunity, exceptional work environment, flexible schedules, market reputation, monetary benefits, or an emphasis on employee appreciation. After all, selling a dream to work in your company before any interview is a step towards overall growth and development of your employees and company. This will not only build a brand for you on job sites, but also in peer groups of people who apply or reach to your legal job ads.
2) Optimal Job Description: The next step in building your brand on job portals is to target the right candidate; to do so avoid including your entire official job description while putting up an online job post because a long and boring description of roles and responsibilities cannot attract the right candidates. Instead mention only the essential duties and qualifications that cannot be compromised. From there, state clearly that one must meet these requirements in order to get through the preliminary selection process. This practice will help you in targeting qualified applicants and eliminating candidates that do not meet your essential job requirements.
3) Make Your Job Ads Interactive: A simple yet effective step towards building your presence on online job portals is to make your application process interactive. For example, try to provide applicants with directions to follow; make their job search interesting and give them something to think about when they apply to your job ads. A simple way of doing this is to give them a task to be completed with the application. You can ask them to write a paragraph explaining how their experience qualifies for the stated position. This will quickly weed out all those applicants who apply to almost every job but end up nowhere, and those who do not qualify for the position. This practice will not only lower the number of application forms, but also, help you in judging how well an applicant follows directions.
4) Choose Right Keywords: You've learned to manage and optimize your job post, but now it's time to make it visible in every search thread. For this you need to ensure that you incorporate right keywords associated to the job in your online job ads. Most applicants search through the results a job portal provides, by searching for vague keywords. For instance a paralegal position can be searched with keywords like - legal assistant, junior level jobs, etc.; similarly an attorney position could be searched with keywords like - associate, counsel, lawyer, etc. By adding such keywords to the end of your legal job ads and including them into your job descriptions and titles, you will have a greater chance of being seen in every search associated to that position. To further target your audience uses the exact area of law you are searching for-e.g., advertise a "Mid Level Patent Attorney with Mechanical Engineering Background."
The best way to judge whether you posted an effective legal jobs post, is to put yourself in the candidate's shoes and consider what could possibly appeal to you, or what isn't right about your job post. If you think this is too much extra effort, then consider it once and you will see that this effort will pay off with a more qualified job response to your job postings.
Article Source: EzineArticles.com/6675241