Hiring new team members should be exciting, but all too often, it leaves company leaders pulling their hair out. The job listing goes live and, before you know it, you’re flooded with applications. Now you need to find the time to review hundreds of resumes — hoping to uncover that one gem, schedule interviews, and actually carve out time to run those interviews.
If you’re getting a line of top-quality candidates through your door, all that time feels worth it. But when you’re constantly getting the wrong type of people applying for your roles, it can feel like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall.
The Black Professionals in Tech Network (BPTN) was facing exactly this problem as it tried to grow its team. It was overwhelmed by hundreds of applications — and still struggled to hire because the candidates weren’t a good fit for the role. While BPTN had already brought on Castle HR as a fractional partner to help with other aspects of their HR strategy, they were still using an old, generalized job posting that was preventing them from attracting the right talent. So, they asked us to focus specifically on revamping their hiring process to bring in the candidates they needed.
Getting your hiring processes right can transform your company’s growth trajectory by getting people in the right seats at the right time. This is the story of how BPTN, with the help of Castle HR, increased quality hires, reduced applicant volume, and revitalized its hiring processes.
Modernize Your Job Postings to Attract the Best Applicants
Let’s say you’ve received hundreds of applications but haven’t even found anyone you’re excited to interview. Or maybe you’ve interviewed dozens of candidates but still haven’t found the right hire for your vacancies. Your job posting is almost certainly to blame. When you’re pressed for time, it’s easy to pull out a job listing you’ve used before and just tweak it so it works for the new role.
But this can lead to generic, uninspiring listings or ones full of unnecessary details. Instead of just reworking old job listings or using AI to throw a bland job description together, create one from scratch and focus on getting people to understand whether they’re a good fit for the role. Here’s how we helped BPTN do just that.
Simplified Job Posts Give Today’s Workforce What They Want
Job listings need to strike exactly the right balance — providing enough information to engage top candidates by highlighting what they care about while avoiding information overload. If you try to pack in too much information about the role, candidates will just skim the listing, and you’ll be inundated with poor-fit applicants who only meet half of your requirements. “Nobody reads job descriptions these days,” explains Mike Daser, Senior HR Business Partner at Castle HR. “A lot of the time, they’re too long and hard to follow.”
When Castle HR started working with BPTN, they needed to make a crucial hire for a role they’d been struggling to fill for a while. The job descriptions they had been posting were very lengthy and had a lot of content, making it challenging for candidates to identify themselves within the role. We focused on simplifying that job posting.
With decades of experience in the HR trenches helping over two hundred companies, our team knows what it takes to attract an A-list candidate. Each listing needs to be tailored specifically for that role and your organization — if we can take your job posting and put it on a competitor’s site, it’s not going to perform well.
So, we rewrote that problem listing to simplify it and make it easier for candidates to assess their suitability for the role. “Now, their listings cover compensation and benefits, values, expected outcomes, and the interview process,” says Mike.
For example, the original listing contained no information about the application or recruitment process, which made it hard for candidates to know what to expect once they applied for the role. The revised listing gave a step-by-step overview of the hiring process:
How to Apply:
- Click the ‘Apply Now’ button on our website.
- Fill in your contact information, upload your resume, and complete the mandatory screening questions.
Our Hiring Process:
- A 15-minute phone screening with our HR team.
- A virtual 60-minute interview with our hiring manager.
- A skill-testing project to be completed and presented in the subsequent interview.
- A final virtual interview with our leadership team to assess fit and values alignment.
- Reference checks and, if applicable, an offer is extended.
We strive to complete this entire process within 2-3 weeks. If you are not selected to move forward at any stage, we will notify you accordingly.
This new listing was laser-focused on giving candidates what they want. Instead of paragraphs about the company and a page-long list of bullet point “requirements,” we made it all about them.
Identify the Expected Outcomes for New Hires
Help applicants understand what’s expected of them — and how their success will be measured — in the role and include that in your job postings.
To help BPTN tackle their recruitment challenges, we started by working out what the expected outcomes were for top candidates in each role. In other words, what would success look like for them in their first three, six, or 12 months on the job?
We made those outcomes explicit in our job listings to help potential candidates better understand the position. “We reposted these jobs with listings focused on the expected outcomes,” explains Mike. “We found the candidate pool was so much stronger when we focused our hiring around those.”
Not only was BPTN able to fill that first crucial vacancy, but they were also able to retain new hires more effectively, as they were getting the right people in the right seats on the first try. “We just did our first round of performance reviews focused on these expected outcomes,” says Mike. The organization is now more stable, values-driven, and it’s no longer facing the significant costs that come with high employee turnover.
How much is employee turnover costing YOU? Find out with our employee turnover cost calculator.
Skills Can Be Taught, So It’s Better to Find Culture Fit
A common mistake we see companies make is trying to find and hire people who have direct experience with a specific role or task. But many organizations (especially small to medium businesses, where each individual has a big impact on the company culture and morale) would benefit more from finding someone who’s the right fit for the company — someone who shares their values instead.
“People always think, oh, I want person X in this role because they’re the best at this specific task,” says Mike. “No — you want the person who’s going to live and breathe your company values at the end of the day.”
He adds, “I’m a big proponent of the fact that you can teach most people anything they need to do for a job. You can teach them about 95% of the skills they need to do most things, but you can’t teach them how to contribute to a company culture and how to live the company’s values.”
In the case of BPTN, its old job listings focused on all the different skills and experiences they wanted from their hires. The job posts became a long, wordy wishlist that people barely read, so they got the wrong people applying.
We worked with BPTN to make their core values a key part of their job listings.
In the original listing, they had a section on candidates’ education and a second one on qualifications, which had a list of 10 bullet points about the skills and experience they were looking for. We revised it, removing the education section and turning the qualifications section into six values-focused points:
Qualifications:
- Passion for Diversity in Tech: Motivated to drive change and make an impact in the technology space by helping Black professionals advance their careers.
- Relationship Builder: Adept at building strong relationships with senior-level executives and driving negotiations to support the growth of a startup environment.
- Adaptability & Flexibility: Thrive in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment, responding well to market shifts and challenges.
- Sales Expertise: 3-5+ years in sales/account executive roles with a knack for solution-based selling and closing deals.
- Tech-Savvy & Business-Minded: Understanding of technology sector trends and strong business acumen, allowing for strategic conversations with clients.
- Project Management & Communication: Effective at managing projects end-to-end, fostering healthy relationships, and managing stakeholder expectations.
As a result, they saw a huge increase in applicant quality, as well as a drop in applicant volume. This meant they were able to spend less time reviewing large volumes of resumes and interviewing poor-fit applicants. Even better, they successfully filled the role they’d been struggling to hire for — with a stand-out candidate.
Hiring the Right People Reduces Turnover and Saves Your Bottom Line
Organizations — especially smaller ones — often struggle to build hiring processes that attract the right people for the role and their company. This can cause real problems because hiring is expensive and time-consuming, and small companies don’t need the stress or expense that comes with finding replacements for poor-fit hires.
BPTN’s story clearly demonstrates that the right HR support (specifically, a fractional team with years of experience and a proven hiring playbook) leads to better business outcomes and saves unnecessary costs. If you’re interested in seeing how the right HR strategy can save your company’s bottom line, we’re here to help. Book a call with an HR expert.
