Recruitment

How To Write A Job Advert That Attracts Talent

You’ve taken your brief with the hiring manager , next up you need to plan how you’re going to fill the role, one of the most underrated tools a recruiter has in their utility belt is the job advert.

I spent the first 10 of my 15 year recruiting career totally not taking job adverts seriously and realising how powerful they can be.

Why? Mostly, I was uneducated when it came to job ads. When I first started recruiting back in my agency days there was a mentality of – get your ad written as quickly as possible, search the database and hit the phones.

Outbound phone activity was one of the key KPIs, if I’d have spent a couple of hours carefully writing a job ad, I’d have probably been marched out the door and I’d definitely not have hit my daily call targets.

There was also no real monetary value to job ads, the agency was buying them in bulk at a ridiculously low price, ROI of ad spend almost didn’t matter. Rubbish copy on a £2 job board credit creates a completely different mindset than posting rubbish content on a £400 job board credit.

So what changed? I’d not long moved inhouse, was spending most of my day sourcing on LinkedIn and still very much blind to the power of a good job advert. I rushed my ads so I could get back to sourcing, but at 40+ live tech vacancies sourcing was proving to be impossible to stay on top of.

There must be a better way, surely? I was having a mooch on the Social Talent YouTube Channel and stumbled upon a video about writing good job adverts. I’d also stumbled up on Mitch Sullivan’s blog, Fasttrackrecruitment.com, where Mitch writes a lot of about the industry but also a lot on job ads.

I thought I’d give it a try. I spent the next week doing literally nothing else apart from rewriting all of my job ads.

It bloody worked.

Candidates where coming to me, really good tech talent was applying for my jobs. I didn’t have to go out and find them, they found me.

I was unearthing great candidates, I didn’t even need to sell the role to them during that first conversation, the ad had already created the hook for me. The couple of hours I’d invested into writing each ad were well spent, they’d saved me a least twice that amount of time in sourcing effort.

For me personally, it was a game changer. Don’t get me wrong there are still roles out there that require good old fashioned sourcing, but I now had more time to spend on those really hard to fill roles because my ads for other roles had freed up so much of my time.

How to get your ads working for you

This isn’t going to an indepth look into the art of writing great job ads. There are people way better placed than me to do that for you – have a chat with Mitch Sullivan & Jackie Barrie , they do a great Copywriting for Recruiters course which I’ve been on and it’s brilliant.

Some high level pointers from me though:

Think ‘audience first’

Believe it or not, potential candidates care about one thing when deciding to apply for a job or not -“What’s in it for me?”.

And that usually isn’t about your company, it’s about the role, what they’ll be doing, who they’ll be doing it with, what will they learn etc. Ultimately they’re looking to understand if what you’re offering is better than what they have now.

Unless you’re a software developer, a legal counsel or a sales manager you won’t know what is important to them in a job, so you won’t be able to tailor your ads to meet their wants and needs.

Speak to some, understand what their drivers are. If the job you’re looking to fill meets these expectations then put them front and centre in your ad. That’s way more powerful than 60% of your job ad being about your company. Make it about your audience.

Be honest

No job is all sunshine, skittles and rainbows , so don’t try and portray this in your ads, be honest. Every job has it’s challenges and frustrations, be sure to mention some of them in your copy.

This benefits you in a few ways, firstly you’re allowing people to rule themselves out if they don’t fancy that type of challenge. Those who do apply are up for it. Also, by sharing the not so great elements of a role, your readers are way more inclined to believe the selling points you share.

Be visible

Put your email address in your job advert. Seriously it’s such a simple thing but makes a massive difference.

A really good candidate may want one question answering before they apply. They don’t know how to get the answer to that question, so they don’t apply and you miss out on them.

Job Descriptions are not Job Adverts

Don’t post a JD on your careers site, I don’t think any explanation needs to be given as to why

Writing style

Work on your writing style. Use your authentic tone of voice, don’t use your fancy formal tone of voice. Be you.

Keep it short, as great a writer you may become nobody wants to read an advert that’s too long. Keep it snappy, focus on what’s important to your audience, too many words dilute your message.

It bloody works

Don’t do what I did. Don’t spend the first 10 years of your recruiting career underestimating the power of a really well written ad. Learn how to do them, invest the time in doing them right and you’ll be blown away by the results.

Follow Me

Find me on LinkedIn , TikTok , YouTube or Instagram where I share lot’s of practical no nonsense advice.