Improve your job adverts, generate more applicants

Recruitment firms have a pretty bad rep when it comes to job advertising.

If you scrolled through Indeed right now, you’d come up against a swarm of job ads, made up of cliché buzzwords and empty statements.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the majority of these will be a copy and paste nightmare, giving the applicant hardly any opportunity to visualise themselves in this role

Yes, this saves time, but do job descriptions attract candidates?

No, advertising does. 

When we just share descriptions, we aren’t engaging our readers. If they do read it, it’ll probably just be a quick scan and then exit.

At Harvey John, we don’t claim to be recruitment copywriting experts – we’re working on this.

But one of our tactics to make our adverts stand out in today’s crowded market is to ask our clients:

“Why would someone doing a similar job, at a similar company, jump ship to join you?”

Most clients frame their answers to this around their personal experience, which gives us the facts and specific details needed to support the aloof claims often made in job descriptions.

It can be as simple as discussing successful projects, growth statistics or even saying the candidate would join a team of 5 instead of saying they’ll join a small team.

But, these details give us the ammo to write engaging adverts that generate the right calibre of candidates, but candidates who’d suit this specific team based on company values.

By using these facts, our adverts become credible.

And credibility is key in retaining the interest of prospective applicants.

So when you’re making your next hire, get in touch with your recruiter and share your story about the company.

We understand that the market has been incredibly busy, but by taking 10 minutes to discuss your experiences with your recruiter, they’ll be able to generate far more interest in your vacancy and fill it quickly.

The more you let us in, the more effective we can be in attracting the right candidates.

If you don’t work with an agency, then HR teams, you’ll need to extract this kind of information from hiring managers to make your adverts shine.

Our candidates not only want to know the full picture, but they want to be able to picture themselves in their next role.

Job descriptions alone won’t enable them to do that.