I might be stating the obvious here, but job ads are extremely important. They are typically the starting point in your recruiting process and inform potential applicants about the opportunity. An adjacent truth is that job ads writing needs to be taken much more seriously.
Almost half the applicants “only” see the job advertisement (ad). They don’t go to your career site to see your carefully crafted Employee Value Proposition. They probably only saw this specific job ad and maybe checked out the comments on a review site like Indeed or Glassdoor.
- When the talent pool is small, job ads are an opportunity to compel and align candidates with what you have to offer.
- When the talent pool is larger, job ads are an opportunity to narrow your funnel to provide higher quality candidates.
Nearly every Talent Acquisition Leader has had some experience with a regrettable job ad. Whether it was left blank, had formatting or spelling mistakes, had a ton of internal jargon and acronyms, used the term “he” throughout the description, or even a copy-and-paste of a shopping list, you’ve probably turned a large number of high-quality potential candidates away.
These are true stories and although they can’t be avoided completely, we have to do something! I know it’s difficult, I know there are tons of different ones, I know, I know, I know…
What makes a good job ad?
- Strong job title
- Clear information about the job
- Concise, common language
- No errors
I like to compare posting a job to publishing a new career site. The scrutiny you likely receive when publishing career pages usually is more stringent than the job ad for a Sales Exec. The hard truth. They are both published on the internet for public consumption. The major difference is that the job ad is more likely to be seen!
Why aren’t they all the glorious pieces of verbal art we would like them to be?
I have heard and used a gazillion reasons why we aren’t there yet. Some of the common ones include:
- Job descriptions are owned by <insert dept. here>, we can’t change them
- Hiring managers and recruiters need to: write better, spell check, etc..
The most common reason I hear though, is “I am not sure where to start!”
Review 100% of your jobs right now!
OK, maybe not 100% and maybe not right now, but if you can, do it.
Acquaint yourself with the body of work that is directly responsible for attracting applicants and determine your error rate.
At a high level, you will want to know how many job ads had errors and how many errors you had overall – there are often multiple opportunities in one job ad!
Correcting these will mitigate some of the more transactional errors like format and spelling. To enhance titles, improve SEO, and use multiple ads for a single job description in your ATS, you will likely need a technology partner or automated process.
If you are interested in learning more about how Joveo can help solve some of these challenges as well as save time and money on your ad placement, let me know. I will connect you with the experts.
