Write Better Job Adverts

Your job description doesn’t achieve what you think it does.

Not if you’re also using it as an advert, that is.

Maybe my recruitment echo chamber has messed up my expectations but I thought we were past this.

Your advert needs to kick off with some sort of pattern interrupt, because it might be the 100th advert that your perfect candidate has read that day. Wake them up. Get some adrenaline in their system.

Reeling off generic website copy about your business isn’t going to do that.

Sell to them.

Every business is selling a product or a service, so your organisation knows how to sell. Implement that knowledge when advertising jobs.

According to a LinkedIn Global Workplace Study, top candidates have the following top priorities:

💰 Salary

🏆 Career growth

🥰 Meaningful work

⚖️ Work-life balance

🌳 Company culture

Here’s one tip per priority to improve your ad response:

💰 According to a poll conducted by recruitment site Reed, you might lose 78% of applicants just by not posting the salary. Share the frickin’ compensation.

🏆 Include short case-studies of people in your organisation who joined at the level of the role you’re advertising and have now progressed their careers.

🥰 Another case-study - what meaningful impact does your organisation have, whether it’s directly from the product or service, or whether it’s charitable activities that employees can get involved with.

⚖️ Be honest and detailed about your working policy. Remote, flexible, hybrid, office based. Save time talking to candidates who don’t want to work in the way your company operates.

🌳 It’s actually really difficult to define company culture because no two people experience it the same way. Include a stage within your recruitment process that gives candidates a chance to speak with employees they won’t directly work alongside. Give those employees the freedom and privacy to be honest with candidates about their experiences. Explain about this stage in the advert.

Last tip on writing adverts: Put the stuff that appeals to the applicant first. Get their heart pumping, get their excitement up.

And then you can reel off your lists of responsibilities and requirements.

Better yet, ditch the list of responsibilities and instead speak about the experience of doing those tasks in an engaging way.

For the requirements, remove anything that isn’t an absolute dealbreaker. Examples of things that can often be removed are degrees, and a specific number of years experience.

Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still get the usual horde of irrelevant applicants. To save your time with these people, set up mandatory qualifying questions that will let through anyone suitable, but auto-reject anyone irrelevant. Some of them will lie to get through but the number will be drastically reduced.

If you implement all of these changes, you should see an improvement in the quality and quantity of your applicants.

You’re welcome 😉