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Juggling all HR tasks quickly becomes challenging for a small HR team. For instance, HR tasks, such as staying compliant with employment laws, managing payroll, and writing job descriptions, quickly become overwhelming. And, the tasks become more challenging when you still perform most of them manually. That’s where using job posting software comes into play.
This is why you need tools to automate certain tasks. For instance, writing good job descriptions is the foundation of the recruitment process. So, you’ll need a job description software to simplify your entire job description management process.
In this article, I’ll show you important reasons to invest in a job description software even if you’re a small HR team. Read on.
Challenges Small HR Teams Face When it Comes to Writing Job Descriptions
Small HR teams face different, unique problems in their job description management process. For instance:
- Resource and Time Limitations: Writing a JD manually leads to time-consuming edits. Plus, there are no pre-approved templates to follow. So you start writing the job description from scratch every time a need arises.
- Poor JD consistency: Due to a lack of templates or previous job descriptions to learn from, your team ends up producing job descriptions with conflicting details. For instance, two JDs might give different organizational definitions.
- Compliance Risks: Labor laws are always changing. So it becomes a challenge for a small HR team to keep up with all the law changes.
- JD Clarity and Content Problems: The manual writing process leads to your small HR team creating a bad JD. So, they end up writing a job description with vague responsibilities, complex language, and full of unconscious bias.
- Scalability Struggle: As an organization grows, the need for more job descriptions rises. As a result, your team struggles to write and edit a large volume of job descriptions that can attract qualified candidates.
This is where a job description software comes in to simplify your small HR team’s JD creation journey. Here’s how:
1. Job Posting Software Saves Time Through Automated Job Description Creation
Small HR teams are often allocated fewer resources and expected to perform well. This means they must be strategic to excel in their duties.
With limited time, it doesn’t make economic sense for them to write job descriptions manually when there are tools to simplify their job description management process.
A good job description lays the foundation for your entire recruitment process. But if your small HR team is still writing job descriptions manually, that means you’re experiencing a tedious process. So you may:
- Lack a cloud library for your job descriptions. You end up writing your job descriptions from scratch.
- Manually rewrite all the organization information, such as the history, mission, and values.
- Have JDs with conflicting benefits and salary information. Hence, leading to mistrust in your potential candidates
- Experience endless feedback loops because there’s no centralized platform to provide feedback at once.
Because of these challenges, your team wastes time and produces ineffective JDs.
How Job Posting Software for Small Teams Helps
A good job description software speeds up your JD creation journey in these ways:
- The platform leverages AI automation to guide you through the entire JD creation journey. Plus helps in revision, updating, modifying, and approval of the job description.
- You don’t start creating your job description from scratch because of the availability of pre-populated content. The software leverages content libraries and pre-approved templates to auto-populate certain job description fields.
- Through advanced intelligent suggestions, the tool suggests the appropriate job title name and job title length.
- Availability of a cloud library for writing and storing all your job descriptions. This boosts your JD creation speed by eliminating the need for endless scrolling on Word documents.
For instance, Ongig’s Text Analyzer increases your JD creation speed through:
- AI-Automated Job Description Writing: With Ongig’s Text Analyzer, building JDs from scratch is easy. Input your job title and watch the software utilize AI to produce a good draft.
- Tailored Template Builder — Use easy templates to build your job descriptions in minutes.
- Efficient User Management — The job description text analyzer makes it easy for you to have as many users as you want. Plus, it lets you give everyone involved in writing the JD different user privileges for building the JDs.
Job Description Content Boost:
- Minimizing Bias: Our job description Analyzer’s “Optimize Content” feature reduces many forms of unconscious biases, such as racial bias, to create inclusive job descriptions.
- Score Boost: Automatically see your job description’s score rise as Text Analyzer’s AI perfects your JD draft.
- Discriminatory Term Removal: The platform flags any discriminatory language by omitting any identified “discriminatory phrases and words”. This way, you attract qualified candidates from different backgrounds.
2. Debiasing Job Description Language with Job Posting Software
The examples of unconscious bias in job descriptions are numerous. And the chances of publishing a biased job description with limited resources and time are high. Plus, it becomes harder to produce a bias-free job description if you’re writing the JDs manually.
For instance, some common biases you might find creeping into your JDs are:
- Gender-coded phrases: Terms such as competitive, principles, leader, objectives, and strong might discourage female applicants from applying to your job postings.
- Racial bias: Phrases such as native English speaker, blacklist, a cake walk, spirit animal, might discourage applicants from Indigenous, Black, and People of Color (BIPOC) backgrounds from applying to your job posts.
- Age bias: Phrases such as ”elderly, digital natives, recent graduates” might discourage older or younger applicants from applying to your job ads.
- Elitism/Education bias: Stating that you only want applicants from certain big schools might prevent candidates from any other school from applying to your job openings.
How Job Posting Software for Small Teams Helps
A job description tool easily helps any small HR team publish a bias-free job description in these ways:
- Highlighting Biased Language in JDs: The tools scan your job description to check for biased language related to LGBTQ+ status, elitism, religion, mental health, ethnicity, gender, age, race, disability, former felons, and more.
- Provides JD Bias Inclusion Score: Some platforms provide a score to highlight the inclusiveness of your job description. This way, you identify biased terms and remove them to boost the JD’s inclusivity.
- Providing Pre-Approved Inclusive Templates: The software stores and provides already approved templates with inclusive language to use when writing a job description from scratch.
- Recommends Inclusive Terms: The platforms provide more inclusive alternatives to replace the biased terms. This way, you attract candidates from different backgrounds.
3. Job Posting Software Promotes Effective Job Description Standardization
Standardized job descriptions benefit companies of any size. A standardized job description promotes proper employer branding, consistency across all roles, and better compliance.
But manually maintaining the consistency of all your job descriptions, especially as a small HR team, becomes challenging.
For instance, you might find yourself publishing job descriptions with conflicting details. Each job description might describe the values, mission, salary, and benefits in different ways. This leads to mistrust among potential qualified candidates.
How HR Software for Small Teams Helps
A job posting software enhances the standardization of your job descriptions in some of these ways:
- Provides Customizable Templates
The software provides standardized templates to help create a consistent job description containing all critical components, such as job title, salary, responsibilities, impact statement, company, and values.
As Kat Kibben, a recruiting expert, points out in a recent webinar, building a good job description template is the foundation of creating consistency across your company. Kibben explains that a well-executed template ensures uniformity across all your job descriptions.
To hear more of Kat’s insights, listen to the webinar recording below:
- Easier to Create Organized Content Libraries
Your team can build and maintain libraries of pre-approved content templates for common job description elements. For instance, you can create a content template for the company boilerplate. This way, you can have unified descriptions of the organization’s mission, history, and values.
- Easier to Maintain, Consistent Employer Branding
With the software, all your job descriptions have a consistent tone and voice. Plus, the visual branding is also maintained across all job descriptions. This shows the professionalism of your organization to potential candidates.
4. Create a Centralized Job Description Library with Job Posting Software
The absence of a centralized cloud library for all job descriptions creates challenges for a small HR team. As a result, all JD documents get scattered in Word documents or the organization’s shared Drive.
So this lack of a unified storage leads to issues such as:
- Using outdated information to write your job description because you can’t access the current information.
- Starting to create a new job description for the same role from scratch because you don’t have access to a similar version you wrote before.
- Poor JD writing collaboration process.
- Poor standardization across your job descriptions.
- Compliance challenges because you can’t provide an audit trail proof.
How HR Software for Small Teams Helps
Getting a job description repository software helps your team in:
- Accessing Existing Job Descriptions: When you want to write a new job description, you don’t have to begin from scratch. You can access a library of previous approved job descriptions. Then use relevant elements of the prior job descriptions as your foundation, hence saving time.
- Availability of Templates and Existing Content Libraries: The tool enables access to customizable job description templates. This process makes it easier to verify that all JDs adhere to standardized formats, language, and guidelines.
- Enhancing Legal Compliance: Pre-approved content libraries and customizable templates include legally needed elements such as EEO statements. This way, any important legal element gets addressed before the JD goes live.
- Serves as a Foundation for Company-Wide HR Functions: With a centralized system, the HR department can access data to guide them through the lifecycles of all employees. For instance, during a performance management process, they can base the success of an employee on the job descriptions. So, they can analyse whether the employee is achieving the goals set in the job description.
5. Job Posting Software Enhances a Smooth Collaboration Process
No small HR team can afford to have a chaotic JD collaboration process. A disorganized JD collaboration process leads to many challenges, such as:
- Scattered Email Feedback Loops: Email chaos arises because there isn’t a central structure where each team member can view or submit feedback for quick access.
- Overlapping edits: Different people involved in the JD creation provide their views independently and manually. As a result, conflicting suggestions arise, often leaving the HR department to complete the job description without clear guidelines.
- Delay in JD approvals: A disorganized manual JD creation process builds a bottleneck of approvers who create confusion about who needs to approve what. As a result, the HR team ends up publishing the job description late.
How HR Software for Small Teams Helps
Job description management software smoothens the collaboration process in different ways, such as:
- Enables Role-Based Access Coordination: With the platform, everyone writing the JD has specific permissions. This ensures that everyone on the team has specific control so as not to mess with another person’s work. This way, everyone finishes their tasks on the set date.
- Provides a Real-Time Feedback Channel: The tool eliminates the scattered feedback process by ensuring all stakeholders can submit feedback on time and in a single platform.
- Simplified User Control Process: Set an “Administrator” control to oversee the user accounts and add new users to the platform easily. For instance, if you want a current worker’s input on a JD your team is writing, you’ll easily add them. This way, you can quickly get anyone you want to either write or edit their part on time.
6. To Build an Organized Job Description Revision and Update Process with Job Posting Software
Picture this: You’re a small HR team with a bulk of job descriptions to revise and update.
But, unfortunately, you have a manual job description revision process. So, you’ll take months to finish revising the job descriptions because of contradicting edits, inefficient feedback loops, and version control chaos.
How HR Software for Small Teams Helps
Job posting software simplifies the JD revision and update process in some of these ways:
- Providing Version Comparisons: The software allows you to view the differences between two versions of a job description. This way, you can decide on the version you want to publish.
- Rollback Capabilities: In case of unintended changes, the tool allows you to return to a previous version of a job description. So, you restore the correct version easily.
- Provides Audit Trails: With the whole visualization of your JD creation, you get a comprehensive audit trail. You can see all changes in a JD, including the date, time, user, and the specific change.
- Provision of Standardized Templates: While editing and modifying the job description, your team can save time by leveraging the platform’s provided templates.
This comprehensive revision process frees your team of hours to do more strategic HR work.
7. Use Job Posting Software To Reduce Compliance Risks
Compliant job descriptions are the foundation of adherence to employment anti-discrimination regulations and laws. These laws are always subject to changes year in and year out. Keeping up with the changes becomes a challenge if you’re a lean HR team with limited resources and time.
How HR Software for Small Teams Helps
Job description management software helps create compliant job descriptions in different ways, such as:
- Availability of Customized Templates: With easy-to-use templates, you don’t have to worry if you have included all the important details. Depending on your software, the provided templates have compliant required sections such as EEO statements.
- Job Description Language Optimization: The tools scan and highlight any discriminatory language that might get you on the wrong side of employment law.
- Automated Employment Laws Updates: An efficient description tool keeps up with updates in labor laws and regulations. So, the software automatically updates its content guidelines. And provides templates to help with the changes.
- Detailed JD Audit Trails: Job description platforms enhance the visualization of the entire JD management process. You can view any version of your job description. Plus, the tool ensures you can see who made any edits and why. This audit trail becomes part of the evidence during any employment-related legal battle your organization might face.
8. Investment-Worthy for Small HR Teams
For a small HR team, you might wonder what the need is for adding extra costs by getting a job description software.
But once you audit your job manual job description journey, you realize it’s not an extra cost.
Because writing JDs manually has numerous hidden costs. For instance, through the manual job description process, chances are high that you’ll write a biased job description. And this means you’ll miss out on a big pool of qualified candidates.
And, a poorly written job description leads to high employee turnover, lower time-to-hire, high compliance costs, and getting bad hires.
How Job Posting Software for Small Teams Helps
So here are some ways that a job description management software saves your organization direct and indirect costs:
- Eliminating the Need for Hiring Agencies
In cases where JDs are hard to write or the organization writes poor job descriptions, they often hire agencies to manage the talent sourcing process for them.
But by improving the quality of your job descriptions through a job description software, you eliminate the need for expensive recruitment agencies because you’re organically getting qualified candidates
- Reduces Cost Per Hire
Every time there’s a constant vacant position, that’s lost productivity and revenue for the organization. But by speeding up the JD creation process and smoothing the JD approval process with the help of a job description tool, your open positions get filled on time.
- Minimized Employee Turnover Costs
High employee turnover leads to costs associated with hiring, onboarding, and lost productivity. JD software helps you write a comprehensive job description to attract and hire the right candidates.
This leads to both low direct and indirect employee turnover costs. Because once the employee starts working, they realize that’s what the job description stated.
- Efficient Applicant Job-Match:
A well-written job description leads to attracting the right applicants. Hence, reducing the screening time and the hiring of bad hires.
Moreover, by investing in a job description management platform, you’ll find that the productivity of your lean HR team has improved. So you won’t need to increase your HR staff.
5 General Factors to Consider When Choosing a Job Posting Software
Ready to get your small HR team a job description management platform? Well, here are more general factors to consider before you make the purchase:
1. Ease of use
Before making a purchase, check the user interface of the tool. Does it look easy to use for your team? User-friendly platforms will help your team manage the entire job description management process without any challenges.
2. Scalability and Customization
Choose a job description management platform with customizable options to suit your company’s needs as you grow. This way, you don’t start looking for another platform once your small HR team starts writing a bulk of job descriptions.
3. Customer Support and Training
Consider the training and support the provider offers. Choose a vendor with timely assistance. This can include training your team to use the tool, user guides, responsive customer support, and tutorials.
4. Pricing
The cost of the tool should be within your organization’s budget. Plus, once you evaluate the costs and benefits, it should provide value for your money.
FAQ: HR Software and Job Posting Software for Small HR Teams
1. Do Small HR Teams Need Job Descriptions Software?
Yes, because small HR teams get tasked with different responsibilities with limited resources. Investing in job description software helps the team automate the job description management process. And give them time to handle more tasks.
2. How is a Job Posting Software Different from Regular ATS Features?
Job description software simplifies your entire JD creation journey. The tools help with automated JD writing, simplify the collaboration workflow process, and provide version control for a simplified JD revision and update process. While regular ATS will just host your job posts.
3. What if we already store our Job Descriptions and Templates in Google Docs?
Google Docs doesn’t create a centralized library to access all your job descriptions. So this leads to endless scrolling. And struggles while trying to locate a job description. While a job description software creates a centralized library where you can manage your entire job description journey without the need for another tool.
WHY I WROTE THIS:
Efficiency is crucial if you have a small HR team. So you have to find ways to simplify most of the HR duties. One crucial HR function you can start simplifying is the JD creation journey by investing in JD software.
Our mission at Ongig is to make your hiring journey easier by helping you write good job descriptions. Schedule a demo today to learn how we can take your JDs to the next level.
The post 8 Reasons Small HR Teams Use Job Posting Software first appeared on Ongig Blog.