Don’t Let Your Job Post Exclude the Best Candidates

Here at The Right Five, we are committed to ensuring the first sales hire B2B tech founders make has the right skills and attitudes. We do this using proprietary technology that delivers the Pathfinder sales candidates (those with the requisite skills and mental framework) proven to be successful in this first sales hire role.  

However, if the job description you post isn’t done correctly, you will limit the talent pool that might be interested in working with you and unintentionally exclude candidates who may have those requisite skills and mental framework. 

In addition to not making your listing long and boring, you need to make sure you are avoiding bias in your language. Why? You don’t want to discourage amazing candidates that could be great additions to your team through careless language. 

There are number of things to consider to filter out bias, here are the top 3:

1. Take Gender Out: Research by Textio has shown that language in your job post will predict the gender of the person you hire. The way to avoid this is to use gender neutral language in the job description, or gender balanced. 
2. Let Your Values Shine: Research from the Gallup organization shows Gen Z and Millennials want to work for a company that reflects their values, has ethical and transparent leadership, and cares about their wellbeing. Highlight how you are building those factors into your corporate culture as your company grows. It is predicted that by 2025, 75% of the workforce will be Millennials, so getting this one right is critical. 
3. Express Your Commitment to Equality and Diversity: This isn’t about being woke or politically correct, rather it is reflecting the world that most of your job candidates grew up in. This commitment is an expectation of today’s candidates, not a nice thing to have. For many to consider working with you, knowing that you support equity and diversity is critical. 

Starting a company is never easy. Getting the right employees is never easy. Removing implicit and explicit bias from your job description is one way to ensure that you maximize the size of talent pool you can choose from as you grow your startup.

One or other little secret that we’ll expand on in a future post…might it be that candidates with those Pathfinder skills are not currently in a full-on Sales role? You might be surprised by the answer, in which case why would you exclude potential candidates by specifying, for example, that all applicants must have “10 years quota-beating Sales achievement”?

Ordinarily, maximizing the number of candidates creates a headache in that your workload in sifting through their resumés is proportionately increased. However, with The Right Five, we remove that problem. All candidates must complete our assessment and the right five Pathfinder candidates will be delivered for you to interview. All you have to do is select one.

We will be live in Q1 2022. To learn more about our launch and how The Right Five can help you get your first Sales hire right, please contact us using the sign-up form in the left hand column.