Job Adverts - Do they help attract talent you need?

As someone that has worked within the Talent industry for nearly 20 years and always told, regardless of whether you are in-house or agency, your managers will always advise and demand every role has a job advert posted. And we have all been there and quickly googled similar roles and copying and pasting the job description and posting this onto LinkedIn, obviously having completed a couple of company name changes.

But the question is raised; does this get you the results you need or are you just ticking a box and having that ‘admin’ task completed or do you sit and pray the perfect candidate you need reads that boring and unhelpful thing you call a job advert (that is actually a hybrid job description come job advert!?) will be excite and get the attention of that dream candidate to apply for the role?

So why do we keep doing this? We know the job advert is rubbish and not going to yield the results we need. I suspect we do this out of laziness and with the mindset that all other companies are doing something similar so believe this is the best thing to do as well as having the knowledge that the belief that job advert applications rarely get the hire or do well within the role, we will continue to use our ninja sourcing skills to find that perfect candidate. However all recruiters I have been speaking with recently have been commenting on how the volume of applications is increasing, with the workload of reviewing applications has caused them reduced time in sourcing.?

Based on this why do we send out rubbish job adverts that are not helpful to anyone and will likely have a bigger impact with your employer branding, which overall will have an impact with attracting talent further down the line.?

I personally don’t think that companies are using job adverts to their full potential and really missing a trick to be really creative to ensure the company and role sounds really interesting to an untapped talent pool. Just think if you were an applicant would you apply for the role and have an interest in the company based purely on the job advert you have posted? For the vast majority of job seekers the job advert is the window into the company, they will do little research aside from reading the job advert (yes its always encouraged and some will do but likely applied candidates will more than likely read the advert and apply), if its not interesting or engaging in what you expect them to do, don’t expect many applications.

The reason I raise this is due to my personal view that now is the perfect time for recruiters and employer brand experts to think about being creative with job adverts. A company that moves to being creative and doing something different with the job descriptions will really set them apart from the competition and if they have a strong employee value proposition will be able to attract really strong talent.

Future of Job Descriptions

Posting the same as what everyone else is doing, clearly isn’t going to help you with the building a better employee brand, what do you need to do that can help and drive something different? The key question to ask is, what do you want to do get across to candidates?

I would imagine items such as:

- The company

- The Role

- The culture

- What the individual will be doing

- What will you offer the individual

Firstly my view is that a written job advert will not stand out from the crowd and be something that will engage the relevant talent you are looking to attract or connect with. You need to remember that the key aim of a job advert is to engage the audience and get their attention to at least have some engagement with the candidate, which you can work on talent engagement strategies.

Once you understand what message you want to get across you need to think around the various areas that you would promote your role:

1. Twitter / Instagram - would have a different approach, you wouldn’t want to just post your role advert on Twitter and expect to get a response of relevant individuals.?

2. LinkedIn - again the approach here is going to be very different to Instagram post, you will need to make the content more engaging than just a picture like Instagram

3. Job Boards - in my view becoming more of a bottleneck to hiring processes, but still a useful tool and they are driving the continuous approach of requiring a set job advert design, which is causing recruiters to have a pre-defined standard, which is not engaging to candidates.

4. Career Site - you should have the ability to have greater flexibility here as you will own the overall set up and feel to the job advert and should be (marketing 101) the one place where all other content you push is driving people to your careers page (which will also drive a better candidate experience in looking at your companies website, how easy can they get company reports, learn about the product etc).

As you can see from the above points every channel requires you to think and apply something different, yet all recruiting teams spend little time thinking around the overall approach and best way to communicate the?overall approach.

So how can and should job adverts change?

In a world where everyone has a focus on short term and attention spans are decreasing, it is becoming ever more difficult to write long pieces and have these are the marketing efforts to attract the best candidates. More often than not these candidates do not have the time or desire to think about looking for a new, they might consider or look at this if there was something that grabbed their attention.

Job Advert Ideas

Here are some interesting ideas that I think can excel your ability to engage talent in a different way and something I think that needs to happen within the job advert space:

1. Video Content: Candidates are calling out to understand what life looks like inside companies, writing this is extremely difficult, a really engaging way to do this is capture this and share this. Don’t write about the company speak the company through your employees and cover how this role plays a key role in building / shaping the future of the company.

2. Podcast Job Description: Within the job advert itself why not include content around the role itself, have the hiring manager talk about the role and what challenges or problems they will need to fix.

3. Team Information: Get the team to add to the content and what they are working on, give some examples and include team members within the wider content, helps people see who they will be working with and more on micro-culture environments that you don’t see in the interview process and a way more important but not visible until you are in the company.

4. Gamify a lot of the key items: turn the job description into something that is engaging and individuals need to engage with, as in do something with to find out more information for example or quiz’s to see if they are aligned to the role.

5. Ensure you include the salary details of the role: this will help you in the long run and shows the candidates how open and clear you are on key information.

Top Tips for Building Great Job Adverts

Here are nine tips that I hope recruiters can follow and think through when building an engaging job advert:

1. Spend time thinking around who you want to hire: I don’t think we spend enough time in this space, this is (for me) the most crucial aspect, go through what skills you need, why do they need those skills, who are they working with, how will this person need to build relationships, what is the growth opportunities for this role etc

2. Build a candidate persona: Spend time researching who you want to hire and why would those individuals want to do this role and walk through how your company and this roles story feeds into this

3. Work with the hiring manager and hiring teams to really understand what is attractive about this role

4. Speak with new hires (this should be done regularly) to understand why they joined your company, why did they turn down other roles or choose this company over any other? This will help with building candidate personas?

5. Focus on storytelling; pulling all the information you have from the above start creating your job profile which you can turn into a job advert

6. Cut out waffle and boring information, remember the job advert is that an advert for a job, you need to think like a marketing individual (if your stuck work with marketing for help and guidance; if you have an employer brand marketing work with them to create compelling stories) focus on something that is attention grabbing at the start and where possible have as little writing as possible, the first sentence or paragraph should summarise everything about the role the rest is the information in more detail, think of having something like a TL;DR at the top.

7. Think about channels; as I have mentioned above promoting roles across different channels (in essence marketing channels) is hugely different, you need different strategies for engagement.

8. If you are using tags, think like an SEO expert and research the tags, who looks at these, what’s the volume etc In most cases don’t jump to the highest one, if you focus on volume means your messages will likely be lost within all the other posts, think more niche within what you need (there are some free sites that really help tell you the rating and ease in being top of that word category)

9. Drive everything to you careers site, if you can build a really compelling story that will help drive more traffic into your careers site which will give you an additional opportunity to drive further attraction.

This is time consuming and an effort but once you have the message and done this process once you will have a lot of information to be able to leverage for all other opportunities. The more content you build and create the more that you can leverage and easier it will be to tweak and edit the content once you have the data and insights for the roles you will be hiring for. I’d also challenge you on your desire to hire the right person over the wrong person, the more time you spend ensuring you get that right the better hiring you will do - this process will help you here.?

Through some of these key concepts we can end job advert misery! If you want to take anything away from this post its to really focus on trying to see what works (A/B testing) as well as have fun, its very unlikely that you view your company as boring, don’t allow candidates to think your job adverts and company is boring. The job advert is a window into the company and you will only have one shot to get their attention. Don’t be like everyone else, be unique, be you, be your company.

Happy Hiring