Paste a job ad and see what published research says is costing you applications. Every check names the study, the sample and the effect size, and the one check whose evidence is split says so. No sign-up.
No pay range found.
A randomised trial across 20,088 jobs found mandatory pay disclosure raised applications by 49% for both genders. Indeed reports 49% more apply starts for postings carrying salary, schedule and benefits together.
Publish a range. This is the best-evidenced change on the page, and increasingly a legal requirement.
Dataset: Randomised trial across 20,088 jobs at 8,906 firms on Pakistan's largest job platform. A job market paper, not yet peer reviewed, and 56% of control ads already disclosed pay.
Source: Amen Jalal, Screening Women Out? Pay Transparency in Job Postings (2026)No concrete bar, such as a number of years, was found.
In a field experiment, stating an explicit numeric bar raised the application rate of qualified women from 6% to 29%, while qualified men were unaffected. Vagueness deters the people who self-assess hardest.
Say plainly what the minimum is. Vague seniority language suppresses applications from qualified people.
Dataset: Field experiment on Upwork, 1,083 freelancers in the main regression.
Source: Management Science, Whether to Apply (2024)4 optional-qualification phrases found.
Randomising 60,000 viewers across more than 600 roles, removing optional qualifications and intensity adjectives raised applications by 7%. It did not differentially help women, so treat it as a volume lever rather than a diversity one.
Cut the wish list. Every optional requirement reads as a real one to somebody.
Dataset: Randomised across 60,000 viewers and more than 600 corporate roles at Uber.
Source: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Words matter: Experimental evidence from job applications (2024)No mention of remote, hybrid or onsite.
Remote roles were 19.4% of paid LinkedIn postings in February 2022 but drew 50.1% of all applications. The advantage has narrowed since, but candidates still filter on it, so silence costs you applicants either way.
State it explicitly, including if the role is fully onsite. Candidates filter on this before they read anything else.
Dataset: Paid LinkedIn job posts in the United States, February 2022.
Source: LinkedIn, Remote jobs attract a majority of applications (2022)127 words.
Sources agree that very long postings do worse and disagree about the ideal floor. LinkedIn measured posts under 300 words drawing the most applications per view across 4.5 million jobs, while Appcast puts the best band at 201 to 400 words and finds under 200 words performs worse. Both find a fall-off past roughly 600 to 700 words.
Dataset: About 4.5 million jobs posted in 2016 and 2017 in the United States and United Kingdom.
Source: LinkedIn, New data: shorter job posts get more applicants (2018)6 masculine-coded and 0 feminine-coded words found.
This flags the word stems published by Gaucher, Friesen and Kay in 2011. Be careful with it: the real-world difference they measured was about one percent of words, and later evidence is genuinely split. One study of 296,000 postings plus a field experiment found essentially no effect, while a 3,503-applicant time series found about four percentage points more women applying. Four commercial tools built on this literature agree with each other in only 11.6% of cases, which is why this tool highlights the words and leaves the judgement to you.
Dataset: 493 job advertisements in study 1 and 3,640 in study 2, coded for masculine and feminine word stems.
Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality (2011)There is no study. It traces to a Hewlett-Packard internal report that nobody can produce: McKinsey's lead author, asked directly, said he had no access to the document and that it came from confidential interviews. When researchers finally tested it across four studies in 2024, they found no reliable gender difference in application intent at either 60% or 100% qualification fit.
Most job posting tools repeat it as a reason to cut your requirements. Cutting optional requirements is well evidenced on its own, so you do not need the myth to justify it.
Source: Salwender & Stahlberg (2024), European Journal of Social PsychologyThe largest drop-off in hiring is not in the posting at all, it is in the form behind it. Applications taking one to five minutes convert at 7.7%, against 5.2% at sixteen minutes or more, measured across two million job ads. No wording change competes with shortening your application.
Dataset: 2,012,457 job ads from 1,465 US employers over the six months ending June 2024, job-board ads only.
Source: Appcast, Best Practices in Job Ad ContentSearch for how to write a job ad and you will be told that candidates decide in fourteen seconds, that gender-neutral wording lifts applications by forty percent, and that women only apply when they meet every requirement. We went looking for the sources. The fourteen seconds has none. The forty percent is vendor marketing with no dataset. The hundred percent claim traces to an internal report at Hewlett-Packard that nobody can produce, and when researchers finally tested it in 2024 across four studies, it did not hold.
So this tool only checks things that have a study, a sample size and an effect size behind them, and it shows you all three.
Gender-coded wording is the most popular feature in this category and the least settled. The 2011 study everyone builds on is real, but the difference it measured in actual job ads was about one percent of words, and its experiments used roughly eight times that dose. Since then a study of 296,000 postings plus a field experiment found essentially no effect on who applies, while a time series at one firm found about four percentage points more women after masculine language was cut.
The decisive finding, for us, is a comparison of four commercial gender-decoder tools run across 160,000 job ads: they agreed with each other in 11.6% of cases. A score that four tools cannot reproduce is not a score. So we highlight the words, name the study, and let you decide.
Applications taking one to five minutes convert at 7.7%. At sixteen minutes or more, 5.2%. That is measured across two million job ads from 1,465 employers. No amount of rewriting competes with deleting half your application form, and the research is blunt that the effect is strongest in healthcare and technology and close to absent in retail.
Once the ad is right, the constraint moves back to reach. The Candidates Per Hire Calculator tells you how many people you need to contact, and the Recruiting Outreach Checker scores the message you send them.
How many candidates you must source for a hire in your role and industry, from cited benchmark data.
Paste the email you actually send and see what is costing you replies, scored against 6.2 million sequences.
Turn a role into a Google or Bing query that searches public profiles across eleven networks, including LinkedIn, GitHub and Google Scholar.
Fixing the posting lifts the people who already found it. HeroHunt goes and finds the rest: 1 billion+ profiles, screened against your role, with the outreach handled.
