Available for | Roles | Super Admin, Admin, Team Member |
Permissions | • Create and edit postings | |
Packages | Lever Basic, LeverTRM, LeverTRM for Enterprise |
While it is best practice to close postings when are you no longer hiring for a role, your organization may be in an "always-on" state of hiring for certain roles. For positions with high turnover, where many employees have the same role, it is not uncommon to publish a standing posting on your job site so you can maintain a constant stream of candidates at the top of your talent funnel. These postings are known as evergreen jobs.
Risks associated with evergreen postings
Publishing evergreen postings has risks associated when it comes to data hygiene and posting visibility. In this section, you will learn about the nature of these risks. Later in this article, you will learn how to mitigate those risks through the proper setup and maintenance of evergreen postings.
Evergreen postings and data hygiene
The biggest risk with maintaining evergreen postings is the impact they can have on your recruitment data hygiene. While evergreen postings help maintain a steady stream of applicants, simply publishing postings which never close can artificially inflate metrics related to average pipeline speed and posting activity, making it look like candidates are moving more slowly through your recruitment process.
Example
Consider a scenario in which you publish an evergreen 'Call Center Representative' posting in order to maintain a deep pool of candidates for this high turnover position. You quickly advance the the most qualified candidates, leaving silver and bronze medal candidates in the 'New Applicant' stage of your pipeline. Three months after publishing the posting, when backfill is required, you re-engage with one of the initial silver medal applicants who is still looking for work. Two weeks after re-engaging with this candidate, you hire them. As a result, metrics related to this candidate will skew aggregate trends on your Visual Insights dashboards since the candidate opportunity remained active and idle for most of the time while this posting was open. Specifically, the following key metrics would be affected:
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- Time spent in stage - since this candidate spent three months in the 'New Applicant' stage, the average time in stage for the 'New Applicant' stage will be driven up.
- Time to hire - from a system perspective, it took three and a half months to hire this candidate, though you were only in contact with them for two weeks (the precise measurement would depend on how the time to hire calculation has been configured for your Lever environment.)
- The age of the 'Call Center Representative' posting will also continue to increase indefinitely, which can impact metrics used for prioritization on the Recruiter Operations and Hiring Manager dashboards.
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If you were to multiply the effects described in this example across multiple postings and candidates, you can see how evergreen postings can quickly have an outsized impact on your recruitment data if not managed correctly.
Evergreen postings and job board visibility
Another risk with evergreen postings concerns their visibility on job boards. As postings age, they will rank continuously lower on job boards. If you have a paid sponsorship agreements with your organization's job board vendors, it is possible that your evergreen postings could be promoted on those job boards. However, there is no way to promote evergreen postings on job boards from within Lever.
Best practices for managing evergreen postings
This section describes the measures you can take to mitigate the risks of publishing evergreen postings in Lever. Adhering to the following best practices will help you maintain good data hygiene and fresh posting activity.
Close and re-create evergreen postings at least every 90 days
Since you intend for evergreen postings to be visible on your job site for an indefinite period of time, commit to closing and re-creating these postings in Lever at least once every 90 days. This will ensure that candidates associated with these postings will not have an artificially slow pipeline velocity (i.e. the start point in each candidate's journey will never be more than 90 days before their first advancement). When closing and re-creating evergreen postings, follow these steps:
Step 1: Duplicate the current posting
- Navigate to Jobs and select the posting that you wish to duplicate.
- In the posting editor, click the ellipses (⋯) and select Duplicate. A draft copy of the posting will be generated.
- Select a distribution for the new posting (external, internal, unlisted); all other posting details including the job description and interview plan will carry over to the draft.
- Advance through the posting creation process, reviewing the interview plan and submitting for approval (if applicable). For more details on this process, refer to our help article on creating and managing postings.
Step 2: Add candidates that you would like to keep in consideration to the new posting
- Filter your pipeline for candidates with opportunities associated with the current evergreen posting.
- Open the profile of a candidate that you wish to keep in consideration for the newly created evergreen posting. Hover over the posting title on their profile, click the ellipses button (⋯) and select Consider for another job.
- For more information on copying information to a new opportunity, please refer to our help article on adding new opportunities to existing candidate profiles.
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Candidates who are in the process of being considered for the evergreen role must stay associated with the current (soon to be closed) posting. Only candidates that are not presently in contention for the evergreen role need to be migrated to the new posting. |
If you have a large number of candidates that you wish to keep in contention for an evergreen role, use the Create new opportunities option in the bulk action toolbar. This allows you to add the new posting to all selected candidates' profiles at once. To learn more refer to our bulk action help article.
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As you are reviewing each candidate, take this time to archive the opportunities of those who you no longer wish to keep in consideration. Read about Lever's Fast Resume Review feature to learn how you to make your application screening process more efficient. |
Step 3: Close the current posting
- Navigate to Jobs and select the current posting.
- In the posting editor, click the Open button and toggle the 'Job posting is open' option to 'Job posting is closed.'
- Click the Update button.
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Update the title of the posting you are about to close to include the date on which the posting closed so that it can be easily differentiated from non-evergreen postings when reviewing reports on closed postings performance. Keep in mind that if you are generating an offer against the closed posting, you will need to manually update the posting title as it appears on the offer form to remove the close date. |
Use tags to allow for the filtering of evergreen postings
As described in the first section of this article, evergreen postings have the potential to impact your aggregate recruitment metrics. To account for any variances in your data resulting from candidates associated with evergreen postings, you can tag the opportunities of candidates that apply for evergreen roles and then filter for them within the system. When you are drafting an evergreen posting, simply add the tag that you wish to filter by in the posting editor.
That tag will then be automatically added to opportunities associated with candidate that apply to the posting. To learn more, refer to our help article on creating and using tags.
Most dashboards in Visual Insights allow you to filter by 'Opportunity tag.' Use this filter to exclude or zero in on data related to candidates that apply to evergreen postings. To learn more, refer to our help article on Visual Insights dashboard filters.
Only connect evergreen postings to requisitions with an unlimited headcount
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Requisition management requires the LeverTRM for Enterprise package or the Advanced HR add-on. |
Requisitions within an unlimited headcount are automatically factored out of time to fill measurements in Visual Insights. If you are managing requisitions in Lever, make sure that none of your evergreen postings are connected to requisitions that have a finite headcount.
Although evergreen postings are in theory intended to never be filled, linking them to requisitions with a finite headcount can cause those requisitions to be factored in to time to fill measurements once the headcount is met. The intentionally lengthly hiring period for evergreen jobs can therefore skew time to fill measurements if they are connected to requisitions that are counted toward those metrics. To learn more, refer to our help article on linking postings and requisitions.