Adverts - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

A long standing client asked me a question last night...What makes a successful advert?

My immediate reaction was simple, balance.

After I'd put the phone down I spent a while thinking about this, pretty soon I realized its not a single thing and there is no step by step solution to writing the perfect job advert... a lot of this comes down to trial and error and finding what works for you and the company/role you are hiring for.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share a few simple things that can help you uncover or attract the extra one or two people that you might miss or would skip over your advert.

• Check your spelling/grammar. This is one thing I personally struggled with and used spellcheck religiously at the start of my career. Candidates and clients will pick things up  in an advert, especially if its the name of a tech or subject matter term you have misspelled. you need to look credible at all times, regardless of how much effort goes into an advert this will put people off. 
• Know your job boards. Every job board is different, the SEO and search parameters change for each one. If you don't have enough, or in some cases too many keywords, your advert wont show up at the top of the search results (or at all). Know how to structure and tailor your adverts too, even the Headline/Title of the advert will really affect its performance.
• Think about the role. Put yourself in the candidates shoes, where will you be coming from? What would you want next? What would interest you? (Its not always tons of cash, although it helps). Try and imagine the career path of the person you are hiring for and use this to write a compelling advert that will attract the right person with the right mindset for this specific role.
• Don't list skills. There is nothing worse, regardless of whether its tech or not, than seeing your work and career condensed into 6 lines of one word skills you NEED. Picture yourself in the role, make it real, tell the story, sell the business. BE ATTRACTIVE. talk about how a tech or skill would be used in the role.
• Have a balance. This is where your judgement will come in and you will need to work out what works for you. The idea behind an advert is to attract candidates, however over-selling a role or being too specific can really ruin things for you. As a recruiter, reputation is worth more than anything, if candidates know your adverts are full of nonsense and the role is not all its cracked up to be then people will stop applying. Equally if you are too niche with your parameters and don't cast your net wide enough you will miss out on people that would love the role but may be put off by something as simple as '6 years of .Net experience' if they only have 5. (As a side note, I would never ever use 'years of experience' in an advert - it excludes really ambitious people, often the ones your end client will want to hire)
• Work on your timing. if you don't have a delayed delivery function on your platform used to post Ad's then think about when you are doing it. Friday afternoons everyone is in the pub, generally enjoying a beer, especially in the summer. Try a Saturday morning or a Sunday night... people are dreading going in on a Monday so will often have a look online. I've seen load of people doing this on the tube/train and would suggest it would be one of the most successful times to advertise.

I am sure this is all info that everyone has seen before so hopefully it will remind you to do it in the future. Thanks for reading. Ben