Job listings are often the front window of any recruitment effort. For high-tech firms, they can present something of a dilemma, however, as they want to provide enough information to make the role seem enticing, while also keeping the secret sauce behind their innovations away from prying eyes.
Research from George Mason University that for firms in highly competitive sectors, they’re likely to divulge that bit more in order to ensure they can attract the most qualified workers, even if this means potentially giving away trade secrets to eagle-eyed competitors.
Striking a balance
The study suggests that a highly competitive environment tends to see companies divulging a bit less information in their job ads to try and prevent rivals from gaining any kind of advantage, but this is often counterbalanced by the equally fierce competition for talent, which encourages firms to pull out all the stops to attract the people they need.
“They’re balancing the trade-off between not leaking secrets but not hiring the matching candidates, versus leaking some of the trade secrets while more likely to hire matching employees,” the researchers explain. “So between these two trade-offs, obviously, we find that companies choose to bear the risk of leaking information in order to acquire talents.”
The researchers trawled through job posting data from Burning Glass Technologies and calculated what they refer to as the “skill-specificity score” for each of the job adverts. This score was based on the kind of information each advert contained, especially in relation to the skill requirements in the ad and the taxonomy of skills. This allowed them to aggregate this data by firm on an annual basis.
What to disclose
At the core of the study is a tool that is designed to help organizations determine how much information they should disclose in their job ads. The researchers illustrate the tool via a tech firm looking for AI workers. They explain that the firm could create an ad providing a vague job description about needing someone to build machine learning tools, but this is unlikely to attract the best talent.
A more specific ad would outline both the skills the candidate would require and also the kind of projects they’d be working on. This in itself could have various degrees of specificity, with vague descriptions on one end toward detailed explanations of the assignment from both a technical and business perspective on the other. The latter would give the candidate all the information they need about not only the skills required but also the tasks they would work on. Of course, it also reveals information about the technology being deployed to potential rivals.
The study found that when companies are up against tough tech competition, they tend to mention about 27 extra skills in their job ads on average. This shows that getting the right tech talent quickly is more important to them than keeping their secret stuff under wraps.
Wider application
While the researchers didn’t apply their analysis to lower-level positions, such as in cleaning and hospitality, they did look at non-tech positions higher up the hierarchy. They found similar patterns, which they believe suggests that there can be equal benefits from disclosing more information when trying to recruit for managerial roles too.
There was also an interesting distinction in terms of the innovativeness of the firm. The study found that when firms were incremental innovators, ie they tended to build on what came before rather than creating bold new inventions, the effect of disclosure was much higher.
The researchers guess that super innovative companies might not want to spill the beans about their plans in job ads. That’s because sharing too much could risk giving away secret information about the company’s products and strategies, even though detailed job postings can help find the right people.
“[Companies are] basically telling the world what [they’re] trying to create. With higher level of detail you’re trying to describe, you’re disclosing more information to potentially everyone,” the researchers explain. “And that information is beneficial in terms of labor demand because it attracts the right employee. But it’s a concern in terms of competition because you basically show cards to your opponents.”
