What is evergreen job posting?

Evergreen jobs are a position at your organization that are always open, either because they are high turnover positions or, more likely, because they are positions for which you have many employees in the same role. As a hiring manager, you are constantly chasing candidates for this role, spending hours interviewing, qualifying, and finding job candidates who are just the right fit. Evergreen jobs are common in industries like call centers, retail, hospitals, and health care, where companies have 50-100 employees, like nurses or call center representatives, doing the same job but in a different hospital wing, or managing the clients and customer service for many regions over the phone.

SmartRecruiters’s CEO Jerome Ternynck tells Fast Company that for software developers, the time to hire–that is, when an offer is accepted–is about 43 days. The time it typically takes to start is as much as 67 days in the U.S., he says, and longer in Europe.

In recruiting jargon,  this is known as “evergreen jobs,” which means the jobs are posted continuously to keep candidates in the pipeline.

How to select for evergreen jobs?

Skills-based testing and pre-employment assessments are a perfect fit. You can easily map candidate quality and test scores directly to employee retention, making a great case for ROI at your organization. Once you’ve found the right balance in skills testing and retention rates, the evergreen jobs at your workplace will become less difficult to fill. The benefits to testing job candidates are numerous, for both your company and your bottom line. Investing in pre-employment skills testing will prevent your company from having to invest an excess of time and money into finding the right fit for evergreen jobs.

We’ve come up with a couple of benefits that skills testing can offer your company when it comes to filling jobs with higher-than-average turnover rates.

Selecting the “Best Fit.”

Skills testing takes away the mystery in hiring candidates with the right job qualifications. Offering pre-employment assessment tests will allow you to see how candidates will actually respond in the workplace, not just what they are telling you in the interview or resume. Hiring the best-fit candidate for evergreen jobs will greatly reduce your risk of higher turnover rates.

Clear Comparisons in Evergreen Employment.

When it comes to evergreen jobs and higher-than-normal turnover rates, there has to be some type of benchmark set for who should be hired and who shouldn’t. Investing a little more time in setting up a process for recruiting for these types of jobs will decrease the turnover rate and the costs of your human resources department’s time. Skills testing is a great way to set a clear comparison between the candidates applying and the skills of your current staff. If you have high-performing candidates, skills testing will show that and allow you to hire a better range of quality over quantity.

When recruiting for an evergreen position, recruiters need to put a little more effort into retaining the talent they find. Try adding video to the landing page for the specific position, so you can capture their attention and draw them in. After you’ve gotten them to apply, look to skills testing to make sure you aren’t over-spending on the hiring process. In the debate for quality over quantity it’s essential that you are hiring quality candidates for evergreen jobs, to avoid excessive turnover rates.

Have you used skills testing in job positions that are considered evergreen jobs? Has it helped reduce turnover rates? Let us know.