No ninjas required: How language influences job applications

In this guest post, Rebekah Di Blasi reveals how the words you use in your company’s job ads determines how well they will perform in attracting candidates.

With 100,000 more media technology professionals required in Australia by 2020 and only one in four female ICT graduates, employers must do everything they can to build diverse technology teams.

rebekah-di-blasi-jkr-consulting-supplied

As the ‘war for talent’ persists, particularly in technology, leading organisations are fighting for your attention, competing to ensure their message is the loudest and most compelling so that you decide to work for them.

If you read that sentence and found your mouse hovering over the back button, you’re probably a woman. Pick apart my sentence above and you’ll find five ‘masculine-coded’ words and no ‘feminine-coded’ words according to the 2011 paper entitled ‘Evidence That Gendered Wording Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality‘.

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