I’m doing some recruitment at the moment, and one of the things which has really struck me is how badly job adverts tend to be written.
They are generally now written not for print but for the internet, very often a search engine. Sometimes things like social media, Facebook and LinkedIn. And, when you’re reading the job adverts certainly on the job portals, they all start in the same way, “Our client is….”
It’s really hard when people are job hunting to actually get to what the nature of the job is. People aren’t necessarily interested in the type of company first. They’re actually interested in what they’re going to be doing on a day-to-day basis. They’re interested to know, whether or not, they can do the job, before they’re interested in looking at the company.
Very often, someone will say, “I want to be an accountant”, rather than “I want to work for this company, but I don’t care what role I’m in.”
When you’re writing job adverts it’s really important that you sell the job first. We don’t generally think about recruitment people, be it in-house or agencies, as being marketeers. But in fact, that’s what you’re doing. When you’re writing a job advert, you need to put your marketing hat on. You need to think, how do I best sell this job to people out there, so that the right people apply to work with us.
Those right people are firstly, those people with the capability to do the job. It might be qualifications, it might be experience. Secondly, it’s “will they fit in with our company culture, can they get here, do they have the right to work here?” It’s all of those sorts of elements. But, some of those things are moveable. Sometimes there could be VISAs, sometimes people want to move. There’s a cultural element that they buy into. But, first and foremost, it’s can they do the job? And the only way they are going to know whether or not they can do the job that they’re applying for, is if you sell the job properly. And that’s a marketing exercise. It’s writing copy, it’s getting the nuances of the role across to the reader. So that they say, “I want that job. I want to work for this company.”
