Study These kind of job descriptions are more likely to turn away women candidates

Study These kind of job descriptions are more likely to turn away women candidatesStudy These kind of job descriptions are more likely to turn away women candidatesA job listing is the first impression youll give to a candidate of your company. As an employer, you want every qualified candidate to feel welcomed by your listing.Anew study, however, has found that how you frame a roles requirements can alienate and deter qualified candidates from applying.Study Job requirements framed as personality traits can be turn offs for women applicantsTo show the effect of a job advertisements wording, University of Ghent researchers recruited woman job seekers to take a personality test, look at job ads, and rate the ads attractiveness. They found that women were less attracted to requirements framed as traits - You are calm/not nervous - than requirements framed as behaviors - You remain calm in stressful situations - when they held the belief that men would penalize them for being emotio nal or insecure. The researchers call these beliefs negative meta-stereotypes.Women may infer from a negatively meta-stereotyped trait that they would be assessed in accordance with the negative stereotypes recruiters hold about their social group. If this is perceived as a threat to their social identity, women job seekers would be less attracted to the job and refrain from applying, the researchers said.In a separate experiment, the researchers found that wording a listing as a trait would make a woman less likely to apply for a job. Thus, the researchers conclude that including rigid personality traits like You are calm as a job requirement underlines that the way job ads are written may have a discriminatory effect even when there is no discriminatory intent.Why getting the wording right in a job ad mattersIn the early recruitment stage of a job hunt, candidates have little information to base their decisions on, so verbal cues within job listings take on an outsized influence. Thats why asking for a ninja or a guru for your next hire can deter qualified applicants from applying.The bottom lineEverything - from how the role is framed to what words you choose to include - matters. Its a reminder for employers to spend as much time crafting their job listing to get the wording right as they do with any other component of the hiring process.