Here are the fundamentals that drive our approach to training recruiters how to sell jobs and creating job marketing for our own clients.
1. A job advert is not a job description
They are 2 different pieces of content that have 2 distinct purposes and used at 2 different stages of the hiring process.
Around 80-90% of the target candidate audience for any perm job are likely to be employed. Which means it’s unlikely that someone who doesn’t need another job will read a job description. But they might read an advert that speaks to their self-interests.
That’s what persuasion is – speaking to your target audience’s self-interests.
A description informs, an advert persuades.
2. A job advert can take many forms
They can be delivered via a careers page, a job board, an email, an InMail, a social post and even a video.
Posting a job ad is a ‘one-to-many’ channel and as such, delivers its content all at once. That content should be enough to make the target candidate want to either share their CV or ask for more information.
Sending emails and InMails are ‘one-to-one’ channels and so need to deliver its content in stages, rather than all at once. They are ‘interruptive’ channels and so need to move at a pace the target candidate is comfortable with. This will often require 2 to 4 messages before the target candidate is ready to share their CV.
Both job adverts and direct messaging have the same objective, which is to generate interested candidates.
If the job ad was a 400m race, email and InMail would be the 400m relay.
3. A job advert lives or dies on its first 100 words
We live in the age of the Attention Economy
We are all exposed to thousands of marketing messages every day. To cut through that noise, a job ad must tell the potential candidate why the job might be better than the one they’re in, or the others they’re applying for.
And it must do it very quickly.
If a job advert doesn’t speak to the target candidate’s self-interests right from the off, it dramatically increases the chances of those qualified people clicking away.
4. A job advert should be easy to read
For many perm jobs that means keeping the word count under 400. It just has to be long enough to give the reader what they most want to know at this early stage of the process.
It also means using short sentences, regular paragraph breaks (or white space) and simple words – the kinds of words you’d typically use if you were having a coffee with your target candidate.
The first goal of a job ad to encourage the right people to to want to read it from start to finish.
5. A job advert should get the right people interested
The easiest way to get someone interested is to make the job ad about them.
Specifically, that means telling them how the job might make their life more rewarding in some way, or better than the job they’re in.
A job ad will increase that interest by telling the reader the minimum experience (or knowledge) they’d need to be capable of doing the job. In the age of ‘ghosting’, listing too many requirements that aren’t essential just dissuades people from applying.
Good job ads are primarily concerned with attracting the right people, not deterring the wrong people.
Great job ads can do both.
6. A job advert should make it easy for the right people to respond
The more response options the job ad gives, the more likely it will attract that handful of qualified people who might not have responded if sending their up-to-date CV was the only option.
In our world, a good job ad that undoes itself with a bad call to action is a tragedy.
7. A job advert is part of a process
Its purpose is to generate curiosity and/or interest in a job.
Nobody ever knew they definitely wanted a job just by reading the ad. All the ad can do is make people want to know more. It’s a lead generator. Without leads (aka “candidates”) there’s no recruiting.
If enough of the right candidates aren’t entering the top of the funnel, it becomes statistically less likely the job will be filled quickly.
If you try to give the reader everything there is to know about the job in the ad, it becomes too long and a lot less readable. People not reading the job ad is where a lot of those wildly inappropriate applications come from.
The job advert (in whatever form it takes) is the trailer to encourage people to want to see the film.
The film is everything that happens after someone has responded.
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