Hiring personnel is one of the most critical endeavors any organization can undertake. No company, school or organization can grow without employees and hiring for the wrong cultural fit is a potential disaster in the making. One way you can recruit people to join your organization and keep your it in solid alignment is to pay extra special attention to how you design your hiring signage.
In this guide, we’re going to walk you through the steps on how you can design, test and place hiring signage for the best possible effect. Let’s get started!
1. Focus on Legibility
Over the past 20 years, there’s been explosive growth in the area of font creation. And although it’s nice to have choices, sometimes too many choices can backfire. It can be tempting to find a font that you like, yet is a poor choice in terms of legibility. Stay away from fonts that are:
- Cursive
- Narrow in terms of letter spacing
- Too thin in weight (thin stroke)
Examples of fonts to stay away from
These fonts are safe choices - bold and easy to read
2. Typography Size: Bigger is Always Better
Letter size is an important consideration for all signage. Unlike a flyer or letter where the communication is intended to be done at arm’s length, signage needs to be legible from varying distances.
We cannot stress enough how important this design aspect is. Before you begin making any sign, go ahead and print out words and sentences and tape them to a wall. Look at them from 10, 20, and up to 50 paces away to see if you can read the words. This will help guide your design before you get anything printed or displayed.
3. Signage Area: Bigger is Always Better Again!
Obviously, the bigger your overall sign dimensions are, the more effective it will be at communicating to more people. Which also means - going back to #3 - you’ll have more room for larger typography.
Believe it or not, it’s easy to make a sign without using the full amount of real estate at your disposal. And that’s OK. Sign making is an iterative process. It’s normal to make a few versions before you get it right.
4. Go For High Contrast
You can have the perfect font and letter size and yet your sign may still not communicate well. One thing to check is the contrast of the sign. Take this hiring signage for example:
It’s possible this tablet could be used as lobby signage to get passersby to learn about open positions. As you can see the contrast ratio between the white text and the aqua-green background isn’t that high. Low contrast levels keep people from noticing hiring signage.
Now, take this sign for example:
This outdoor hiring signage is as high contrast as it gets. Red and black on a white background is usually the highest contrast ratio that can be achieved. It also helps that the sign is backlit!
5. Always Check Signage From a Distance
There will be a moment when you think your hiring sign is finished. Chances are you won’t be done yet. The final step is to check the sign from various distances. If your sign is hard to read from 25 feet away, you should consider redesigning the sign.
Another good test is to have someone with poor eyesight try to read your sign. The hiring sign should really be designed with that person in mind. Remember, the easier your sign is to read from far away, the more people the sign will communicate with.
6. Location, Location, Location
Where you place your hiring signage can be just as important as the sign itself. If your sign is situated in a location that’s hard to see, the less effective it will be. It’s always a good idea to view the sign from multiple locations and at different times throughout the day.
Things to watch out for:
- How the sun hits your sign throughout the day.
- Rain, dew, and dampness.
- Is it high enough off the ground?
- Can you add more signs in more locations?
- Is it in a place where it can get knocked over, damaged or vandalized?
7. Trim The URL
Depending on your organization’s hiring process, you may try to route new applicants through a specific website address (e.g. example.com/careers). The beauty of this method is that the number of people who view a website address or URL can be measured.
When printing or displaying a website URL be sure to remove all unnecessary characters from the address to avoid cluttering up the design (and to give you more space to work with). Plus, it just improves overall legibility. Take this URL for example:
https://www.example.com/careers
In most cases, this URL can be simplified to:
example.com/careers
It’s much easier to read and remember. Be sure to check any simplified URL in a web browser to see if it’s accessible. There’s a chance that your organization’s website hasn’t been constructed with traditional URL redirects. If that’s the case, you’ll have to shorten the URL as much as you can while still being accessible.
Additional URL Tips
If your IT department can provide multiple URLs for you to work with, you’ll be able to run signage tests. You may want to test:
- The effectiveness of different sign locations
- How different signs perform in the same locations (digital signage works well here)
- The performance of new signs in different locations
By creating an array of different career or hiring URLs, you’ll be able to track the visits to these pages in your website analytics. For example, you could use a URL convention such as:
- example.com/careers
- example.com/career-portal
- example.com/jobs
- example.com/we-are-hiring
- example.com/job-finder
- example.com/join
- example.com/join-us
- example.com/join-our-team
- example.com/new-team-member
We suggest keeping the URL short and easy to remember. Also, avoid URLs like example.com/careers2 or example.com/careers-2. People may forget to add the number and accidentally end up on example.com/careers which would distort any test results.
8. Include Specific Instructions
Just using the words “we’re hiring!” isn’t helpful. Someone passing by may wonder how they start the process. It’s a good idea to give the person reading the sign a brief set of instructions to let them know how to apply for the position. For example, the sign could say:
- example.com/careers
- Apply at front desk
- Take an application below
Make it extremely obvious in the shortest amount of characters possible how they can get started!
9. Does Your Organization Offer A Referral Bonus?
Some companies and organizations will pay employees a referral bonus for recruiting individuals (payout can be in the thousands of dollars!) This type of hiring campaign can work well because the team builds around people they already know, like and have worked with in the past.
In this scenario, it might be more advantageous to have the hiring signage communicate the hiring referral offer. For this type of hiring campaign, signage should be placed around the workplace to spread awareness. Some good locations for this type of signage are:
- Entrance / Lobby
- Elevator Bays
- Cafeterias
- Gym
- Conference Rooms
- Mail Stops
- Beginning of Cubicle Rows
10. Going Digital with Your Hiring Signage
Get started with this hiring digital signage template here
Using digital signage for your hiring signage is a no brainer. If your company, school or organization is already using digital displays throughout your campus, you can easily broadcast hiring signage. Digital signage makes it much easier to target referral-based recruitment and reduces the amount of labor required to manually place hiring signs and posters up.
Try A Free Trial of Rise Vision Today
Rise Vision is a digital signage content management system that makes it easy to create digital signage thanks to our large library of pre-made templates. You can create hiring signage in minutes and broadcast on a schedule to multiple displays. Additionally, you can broadcast videos, emergency notifications and other important information to employees, students and visitors.
