Johnson & Johnson wants to hire workers. What it doesn’t want is a flood of applicants taking a flyer in a tough job market, a common occurrence in the aftermath of the recession.

So the world’s biggest maker of health-care products honed its recruitment strategy, including revamping a career website to provide highly specific information about what it was seeking. The result: the quality of applicants is better, while there’s been a “slight uptick” in its job acceptance rate, said Jeanne Fedoryk, vice president of global recruiting at the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based company.

Companies such as J&J adopting this clearer employer branding approach have seen the pool of prospective employees improve by 54 percent, while new hire turnover has dropped by 23 percent, said Jean Martin, an executive director at CEB, a member-based research and advisory company. There may also be benefits for job seekers, as they’re steered toward positions where they have a better chance of succeeding and away from those not worth the time applying.

“There are more complex job requirements today that require more experience, and a lot of people don’t come in with that,” said Martin, who oversees human resources research at Arlington, Virginia-based CEB. Companies are becoming “quite sophisticated in saying, ‘Don’t come here if you’re not able to work successfully in our environment.’”

Strategy Shift

The strategy shift comes as more than two workers compete for every job opening in the U.S. That’s down from almost seven in July 2009, yet still above its pre-recession level.

While the number of job vacancies is rising -- and started accelerating in February -- hiring isn’t keeping pace. About 4.7 million U.S. jobs went unfilled in June, even though 9.5 million Americans were looking for work that month, Labor Department data shows.

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