Dive Brief:

• Job listings that garner clicks but no applicants may focus more on personality than “specific, checkable expertise,” leaving candidates uncertain what the roles will actually require of them, according to new research from employment platform JobLeads.
• While zero-apply postings tend to list similar median salaries and skill requirements, they are more likely to feature words such as “motivated,” “hardworking” and “following directions.” Jobs in HR are 28% more likely “to be clicked but not applied to” than the baseline, and finance roles are 25% less likely.
• When prospective employees don’t feel engaged by a generic job posting, they may be more likely to abandon their application. In a slow job market where applicants may apply to as many as 90 roles before being hired, per a recent Indeed study, burnout and exhaustion could cause promising candidates to look elsewhere for opportunities.

Dive Insight:

The JobLeads study examined nearly 1.4 million U.S. job postings between April and June, and concluded that “a posting that reads like a template will be treated like one.”

For applicants, the issue is straightforward.

“A job seeker can check whether they know Python or have run a payroll cycle,” the report said. “They can’t check whether they are ‘motivated’ enough — that’s the difference between hard and soft skills. These phrases give readers nothing to measure themselves against, and they tend to appear in postings that feel templated rather than written for a specific role.”

As a result, applicants might read a job post and decide not to apply based solely on whether or not they felt like they belonged at that company, rather than whether they felt they had the right skill set.

“This suggests the problem isn’t that the bar is too high,” the report said. “It’s that there’s no visible bar at all.” The report added that for job seekers, “vague, trait-heavy wording is one of the more common red flags in job postings.”

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