$650 Million Spent on Rewriting Job Postings Annually

Writing is a tough job and a surprisingly costly line item in your recruitment budget. According to newly released research from MightyRecruiter, American companies spend a total of $650 million annually on simply rewriting job postings.

MightyRecruiter released an infographic based on the research, which you can see below, in which the company took the liberty of comparing the cost of rewriting job postings to the construction of a cheeseburger. The three key takeaways from this new study are:

45 percent of companies rewrite job descriptions at least 20 percent of the time.

$650 million is spent rewriting job descriptions every year.

3.75 million labor hours are spent per year rewriting job descriptions.

"Consider that a job posting is a marketing advertisement designed to attract people; it's not intended to be a barrier to entry," writes hiring guru Lou Adler. "When job descriptions are written to attract people in rather than weed them out they are quite useful in finding top people."

Writing an engaging job description is essential to attracting the right talent to your company. As the cheeseburger above implies, a good job description will deliver a larger selection of candidates, higher-quality candidates, shorter search cycles, lower costs, and better employee retention.

MightyRecruiter's study used the Google Consumer Insights tool to survey 206 people in the "Small Business Owners and Managers" category. The company extrapolated its findings across statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The study also hinged its research on the fact that 3.24 million job postings annually must be rewritten and reposted to third-party sites.

How will you write better job descriptions to attract top talent?

David Smooke is CEO and partner at the digital storytelling firm ArtMap Inc. and its media arm AMI Publications. You can read more of his recruitment content on 42Hire. Find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.