Formatting Job Descriptions

Formatting Job Descriptions

This information is for staff responsible for entering job descriptions into the Taleo ATS. When the jobs are displayed on your website's custom job board you may find that the formatting has changed.

By following these instructions you will gain an understanding of why this occurs and how to control how your job description appears.

Internal and External Job Descriptions

Within Taleo you will see two sections to edit your job description "External Description" and "Internal Description". They are used to display your jobs on different job boards. You can write each description separately or copy/paste once you've formatted it correctly (refer to instructions below) -

Internal - displayed only to existing staff when  -
  • your Taleo portal's internal job board
  • if you have staff login for you website you can place an custom internal job board within the secure area and only display internal jobs
External - displayed publicly -
  • your Taleo portal's externaljob board
  • your website's public (external) custom job board
  • other channels such as seek, linkedin, etc

Why does my formatting change?

The formatting of content on every page of a website is controlled by a "style sheet". Every webpage uses the same formatting and styling to improve the user experience and maintain a strong brand. The "style sheet" sets the appearance of fonts, text size, text colour, spacing, and all other formatting. When your job description displayed on your website's custom job board it's appearance is also controlled by the website's "style sheet". All of your formatting choices are deliberately removed so that each job description is formatted the same.

Why are the results still inconsistent?

Some job descriptions are still not displaying correctly - with inconsistent paragraph spacing or text indents.

Here's some examples -

11468-before11760-before

They have usually been copy & pasted from a word processing document like Microsoft Word. The formatting that is applied by this type of program is also attached to the text when it is pasted into Taleo. Before presenting the job description on your website's custom job board our system automatically removes formatting and replaces it with the correct formatting - sometimes it cannot interpret the information and we can end up with no spacing, extra spacing and some other anomalies. You can see the unwanted code by toggling the "source" button -

caode-before

How do I fix this?

The most consistent results are achieved by removing the formatting before inserting the content of the job description and then using the formatting tools provided in Taleo.
  1. login to Taleo
  2. open your job description in your word processing software
  3. copy all of the required text from the document
  4. in Taleo, click the "Paste as Plain Text" button
  5. paste your content (hold "control" and press "v") in the new window that pops up and click OK
paste-as-plain-text-02 

 Line Returns / Breaks 
Now you can now edit your text in the Description editor. Start by fixing paragraphs by adding a double line return -
  1. place your cursor where the end of a paragraph should be
  2. hold "Shift" and press "return" twice . . . Do not use "return" alone - it causes unusual results
Next, fix bullet lists -
  1. removing any bullets or dashes that have been pasted
  2. select all of the list items
  3. click the "numbered list" or "bullet list" button in the toolbar
  4. save your job description
Next, we'll give all of our text a consistent font size -
  1. select all text
  2. click size: "small" in the toolbar
SAVE AND CLOSE Important: your changes will not automatically update on your website's custom job board- it can take up to an hour for new or updated jobs to appear.

Here's the before  / after comparison:

11593-before11593-after

Can I use the same method to update job description templates in taleo?

Yes.

My apostrophes are appearing as questions marks in SEEK -

Your word processing program uses a special character for the apostrophe which is not displaying correctly on SEEK. The best way to fix this is to type over the character in Taleo's text editor and resubmit the job.

Bold is being removed from my formatting -

Bold is deliberately stripped from formatting to match the style guide for your whole website. Instead, for sub headings, you can apply Format > "Heading 3" within the Taleo text editor -

seelct-3

Part of the Job Title is missing? -

In Taleo there are many Job Templates. To be able to identify them some employers add information to the title as a suffix to differentiate each property's template. 

For Example:
  • "Chef - Sydney"
On the job board the property is listed in it's own column so the suffix in title has been removed so it does not appear ass duplicated data