The likelihood of attracting a high potential candidate to your team is far greater if the opportunity is presented to them in the context of a challenge. In other words, what the candidate must accomplish in order to be considered successful on the job as opposed to what they must have in terms of years experience, industry, academics and skills. Keep in mind, that whatever they will be doing in their new job must be significantly more challenging than what they're doing in their current job. The difference between what they're doing now and what a new job must offer to pique their interest is called job spread. You'll have to offer an attractive job spread to interest the best candidates in your opportunity. Marketing job spread is one of the most important things I do as a talent sourcing specialist.

Unfortunately, a requirements-intensive job description posted online is probably going to be the first impression a candidate gets of your opportunity. The reason I say that's unfortunate is because if your job description resembles anything close to what we typically see online, that's surely not a good thing. It's no secret that candidates despise laundry list job descriptions. Consequently, if you publish job descriptions like that, you'll inadvertently discourage the best candidates from even applying. Top candidates rarely respond to job ads in the first place, much less those with an endless bullet point list of requirements. If you want advice on how to write an effective job description, see my blog post here.

In order to attract the best candidates, it's imperative that you put diligent effort into ensuring that the first impression they get of your opportunity, is a highly positive one. Again, this typically starts with the job ad. I have provided a link to the mechanics of writing a good job ad above. Now let's consider the logic of what attracts candidates to an opportunity. The typical approach to qualifying for a position is looking for somebody who has done the same type of work before. But that is an approach that will fail more often than not.

You may be surprised, but here's the reality, the best candidates are almost always superficially under-qualified for the position.

Find out why in Part II of this post.