Equality | The impact of gender bias on candidate attraction

The quality of a job description can dramatically impact the quality and quantity of candidates it attracts. This point is pulled sharply into focus when you consider candidate scarcity continues to be the number one hiring challenge for in-house teams and recruitment firms (Source: The 2017 Candidate Attraction Report – a free 60 page report for planning your attraction strategy).

Job descriptions and advertisements provide an insight into the role, the organisation and the culture, so it’s vitally important that they are geared to attract the right candidates.

However, have you ever given any thought to the psychology of your job descriptions? Academic research has shown that job descriptions can be unknowingly gender-coded and often include more masculine or feminine words, which can deter candidates.

Based on this research, Eploy created Check My Job - a free job description checking tool, which can analyse the gender bias of your job description. Check My Job also analyses your job description against other critical success factors such as length of job descriptions and the inclusion of equal opportunities statements.