Job Benefits Attract Candidates, Advertising Them Will Work in Your Favor

Job benefits attract candidates and advertising these benefits is the way forward—that is what a study by Indeed Hiring Labs has reconfirmed for us recently. It’s no surprise that giving candidates a more attractive offer works in a company’s favor. However, the report showed that mentioning the benefits in a job posting could be very beneficial for a company. 

Many organizations often hesitate to publicly advertise their benefits because they might not appear as attractive in comparison to what others are offering or they might not be able to backtrack on a benefit if a candidate is hired on the basis of that promise. However, it appears that many businesses are already including benefits in their job postings across industries, giving them an advantage over their competition.

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Job Benefits Attract Candidates and Should Be Prioritized in Job Postings

According to Indeed, the mention of at least one employer-sponsored benefit in job postings in the U.S. rose to 59 percent in May 2024, as compared to 40 percent in January 2020. The report suggests that this change has likely occurred as one of the many repercussions of the pandemic. This is a logical conclusion as many workers in the post-pandemic era began to exclusively look for work-from-home jobs, which was a convenience not everyone was able to offer. 

Those that did offer it benefitted from attracting the right talent, while the rest were forced to advertise other benefits to keep up. The study confirmed this reasoning, showing that sectors that offered remote work were less likely to advertise their benefits, compared to low-remote sectors. Low-remote sectors had more reason to try and attract talent with benefits that would sufficiently make up for the lack of remote work. 

The numbers also showed that the trend was more obvious in low-wage sectors, where employers who were already likely to have fewer benefits were more public about offering the benefit. As a result, 62 percent of postings for low-wage jobs had at least one benefit advertised, while 57 percent of postings in middle-wage sectors and 58 percent of postings from high-wage sectors did the same. In the higher-wage sectors, many of the benefits offered are expected by default, eliminating any reason to advertise it explicitly. 

Should You Include Benefits in Job Postings?

The final call on whether you want to advertise job benefits to attract candidates rests with you. If you’re satisfied with the quality of candidates you’ve found over the last few hiring cycles, then you may be doing something right with other areas of our business, like paying a competitive salary or designing a workplace culture where people want to work. These elements may be enough to help you pull the right talent without posting benefits in job ads.

However, advertising job benefits and adhering to the promise you made to the candidate will always be beneficial. In a competitive job market that is full of talent, you may not be able to draw in those who are at the top of the industry precisely because they are prone to scrolling past the company’s job posting without seeing anything to reel them in. Job seekers are becoming more certain about what they want from the organization and what principles they want to align themselves with, and this discretion makes them more careful about applying for a new position. 

The type of benefits offered should also figure into the decision on whether to use those particular job benefits to attract clients. If one of the primary benefits offered is paid time off but a majority of organizations in your industry offer that benefit anyway, advertising it in the posting may convey that it is all the company has to offer. In such a situation, it might be better to avoid advertising that as the single best part of working for the company. 

Medical and insurance benefits are most commonly promoted, but companies may manage significant gains from advertising unique job benefits that help them stand out. Family-related benefits are a good option in this regard, but organizations can also get creative about analyzing what prospective candidates look for, to give them what they want. Identifying these crowd-pullers might take some work, but it can be very beneficial to the company culture as a whole to adopt the right benefits and showcase the brand identity that goes with it.

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