Copying and Pasting Job Descriptions

To save time when posting a new job on HR Partner, many of our clients tend to copy and paste the job description from a Word Document, an internal intranet site, or off another web page.  Sometimes they copy and paste from a EverNote document or Slack or any number of other rich text formatting applications.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this to save time, however there are some hidden dangers by doing things this way.

You see, copying from Word or a web page etc. means that it also fills up your copy/paste clipboard with a bunch of excess HTML code.  These codes tend to be 'in the background' and don't appear when you paste the description in the Job Description editor (which in reality is a mini-HTML editor) within HR Partner.  But they are saved along with the rest of the information that looks fine in the editor.

It is when you go to your public job portal later, or when your job is pushed out the various job board like Indeed and Glassdoor that the problem becomes apparent.  The formatting displayed to the candidate there will look nothing like what you expect, and fonts will look weird, bullets will be missing, images may not show or be scaled wrongly etc.

Here is a small sample of some of the hidden XHTML code that Word inserts into your job description when copying and pasting:

Best Practices for Creating a New Job

For this reason, we recommend the following 'best practice' steps to work around this problem:

We realize that this will mean that extra formatting such as bold, underlines, links and bullets would not come across, but you can easily add all these back in using the buttons within the Job Description editor.  This means that all this extra flair for your job description will be added in with the bare minimum HTML coding needed, and this also means that when the information gets sent to your job board, or to external job board sites, it will be displayed properly.

Remember:

• Formatting is great for making your job descriptions look fantastic, and is highly encouraged, but please use the minimum formatting possible so that it translates across various platforms that may display your job.
• When embedding images, try and use the smallest image size possible, or better still, use a link to an image hosted on your website or somewhere else on the web.
• To get things looking perfect, you can click the '</>' button on the editor toolbar which lets you edit the raw HTML code for your job description.  Once again, use the bare minimum HTML tags necessary.  If you are unsure about HTML programming, ask us (or your web developer) for tips.

Alternative Method

You can also use the online HTML Cleaner site to clean up your pasted code from an external rich text source.  This will strip out any extraneous tags and leave you with very clean and simple HTML.