Writing an effective job advert can be challenging, especially with so much competition out there.
It is important to make your job adverts attractive and to stand out, but also to attract the right candidates.
The type of job advert you create will impact the type of candidate that you will attract. If you are seeking high calibre, hardworking, knowledgeable candidates your job advert needs to more than just another paragraph on a job board.
Search friendly content
One of the main aspects is making sure your advert can be found and then be found by the right candidates. This is where your content needs to be search-friendly. You need to find out what your potential candidates might be searching for and adapt your adverts language accordingly. The inclusion of keywords related to the job type will assist in the searchability of your advert, the ranking of your role, and making your organisation stand out. When using keywords, it is important not to overuse them as it could appear to be unnatural to search engines and will decrease your ranking.
Formatting
Formatting will also play a big part in making your advert stand out. An effective job advert is brief, clear, and to the point and you can achieve all of this with the format that you chose. Many of your potential candidates will be job-seeking online using tablets or smartphones, many may do this during their commutes to and from work or on their lunch breaks. It is important to stand out within a small space of time and therefore being brief and to the point is key to attract attention. Your candidates will be scrolling through pages and pages of job adverts searching for keywords and phrases and could potentially ignore long and wordy job descriptions. Instead of this, try and use short, sentenced paragraphs and bullet points to convey your content. Depending on the job you could go one further and create attractive captions or visual content like interesting typography or graphics.
What information does your candidate want to know?
You want your job advert to engage your candidate and ultimately lead them to contact you about the role or apply. To achieve this, you will need to identify what information is necessary to include about the role and organisation as well as crucial information the candidate needs to know to make them click that APPLY button. Have a look at the example below on how to lay your advert out:
Opening line – This should contain an overview of the position.
Next – What differentiates this position/your organisation from similar roles in the same sector.
Thirdly – what are the essential criteria – experience, knowledge, qualifications, and skills.
Finally – A call to action
This does not mean you should rigidly follow these steps; it is more of a guideline. As previously outlined be brave and let the creative juices flow.
Just make sure you bear in mind the 2 main elements we have discussed:
– What your candidate will want to know – job description and title.
– The platform you are posting your vacancy on. i.e. which industry job seekers use different platforms