Who’s writing your job adverts?

Getting your job advert right is vital to achieving success when advertising your jobs online. Yet when Citizens Advice conducted research on over 800 job adverts, they found that there was “a significant lack of information about what the jobs listed would involve”.

You wouldn’t write a website or a sales pitch for a product without actually informing the recipient about what the product is or does – so why do it with job advertisements? In this scenario, your offering is your job and you’re trying to market your job to appeal to the best and most suited candidate.

When you advertise a job, it’s your chance to sell your virtues to prospective employees. It’s the candidates’ job to sell themselves to you through their CV and interview, but you need to entice your potential employees to apply by selling yourself to them first. You might have a brilliant benefits structure, a great working environment, or you might be paying the best salary in the industry – but it’s all meaningless if you leave that key information out of your job advert.

If your job advert doesn’t contain the right information, it can be a complete waste of time for both you and the candidate. Citizens Advice found that you’re less likely to get the best candidates if job adverts contain little or misleading information, which also contributes to candidates being employed in roles they aren’t suited to. This can also mean you end up wasting money if you have to start the recruitment process all over again, because you haven’t managed to find a good candidate through your job advertising, or you’ve employed someone who isn’t quite suited to the job on offer.

So, what can you do to improve your job adverts and level up your candidate attraction?

It’s a pretty simple formula: content, content, content!

First and foremost, your job adverts need to be engaging. You want your prospective employees to be engaged with your company and WANT to work from you. If you’re bored creating or reading your job advert, chances are that whoever else is reading it will be bored too. A lot of businesses fall into the trap of creating a generic job specification or advert for a particular role and re-use that same template over and over again for years. I’m afraid that this just won’t cut it in 2019 – you update your B2B/B2C marketing material regularly (I hope), and the same treatment needs to be given to your job adverts.

If you look at your job adverts from a candidate’s perspective, you can quite obviously spot instances where it’s a rushed job done without any care, and with a ‘yeah, it’s alright, that’ll do’ type attitude. These are the job adverts that fail.

What can you do to make your job adverts more engaging?

Well, you’ve got a couple of options. If you’ve got an internal marketing team you can get them on board to help with writing some killer copy to attract great candidates.

If you don’t have an internal marketing team, or all their resource is spent on other marketing activities, then partnering with a specialist is a smart thing to do (not least if they can also help with other job marketing and recruitment activities).

These days loads of companies outsource their recruitment and/or job advertising to specialist companies. As a leading online recruiter, eRecruitSmart has decades of experience in marketing job roles and sourcing candidates for a variety of industries. We don’t just publish our job adverts across all of the leading UK job boards, a huge part of what we do is writing job advert content in an engaging way to attract candidates to apply. Though, this doesn’t mean we just need to be good at copywriting – we have to make sure we keep informed about developments around keyword optimisation and job board algorithms to ensure job adverts keep performing so we can continue to drive great results.

Candidate attraction is a big priority for lots of companies, and good candidates are easy to attract through your job adverts when you know how: with the right content, the right keywords and the right job boards. Always consider who is writing your job adverts and whether they are best placed to do so – if not, it’s time to make a change so you can start hitting on success.

If you’re thinking about outsourcing your job advert writing, why not let the UK’s only ISO accredited Online Recruiter create engaging job adverts for your business and broadcast them to millions of jobseekers across the UK’s top job boards?

Get in touch with us here and let us help make your recruitment smarter. We love recruiting and want you to love it too!