How to Create Catchy Job Ads to Attract the Best Candidates

How to Create Catchy Job Ads to Attract the Best Candidates

Sometimes you do everything you can to attract applicants to your company, but somehow you can’t find the right specialists. Time goes by, and you still find yourself waiting for the ideal candidate. What can be wrong? Is your vacancy not good enough? No! The trouble might be with your job ad.

Every recruiter knows that writing an impressive job ad is not easy due to factors, such as:

• A highly competitive job market.
• A need to frame the position description in a clear and attractive way.
• A need to get the job out to the right set of applicants.
• A need to use search engine optimization.
• A need to follow the rules of the platform on which you place your jobs.

Use these tips to create the perfect job advertisement for your website, job boards, career sites, as well as all other platforms for posting work:

Keep in mind that no matter how great your job ads are, they’re useless unless you have systems in place to assure your employees want to stay at the company. This means using an employee scheduling software platform that makes it easy for your employees to receive their schedules as well as easy to swap shifts whenever they need to.

1. Find Out More About Whom You Wish Your Ad to Address

While content marketing is always targeted at individuals, their behavior, as well as their interests, the process of creating a job advertisement is similar to the advertising process as a whole. The first thing a marketer does when it comes to creating a piece of valuable content is he or she gathers information about the individuals for whom this content is intended.

Targeting your job offers at individuals with particular qualities means knowing their needs and interests. By conducting research on your target audience, you can get a better look at what they expect from a vacancy and how you can enhance interest with your ad.

How is it done?

You can start by looking through the similar job offers. It’s not only useful to make sure the job description you provide is accurate enough, but it can also give you a hint about how other companies represent their advantages. You will also get a chance to compare the competitiveness of your offer.

Another way to adjust your job advertisement to the needs of your target audience is to look through the profiles and resumes of specialists that have positions similar to the one you are advertising.

All the information you find during your research process can come in handy for:

• Adjusting your list of responsibilities.
• Including potent promises that will attract candidates (which you can keep).
• Comparing and optimizing salary range.
• Reflecting the points that candidates are looking for.

The more in-depth research you conduct, the more precise the information will be, and from it, you can create a more fitting job advertisement.

2. Put More Effort in your Title

What’s the first thing a person sees when looking through job offers? Titles of course. This is the element you should work on to make it catchy and attractive in order to create an excellent job advertisement.

The perfectly phrased job offer title is reason enough for a candidate to open your advertisement and click “apply.” And it has the following qualities:

• Excellent punctuation and literacy
• Clear language
• Intelligible and understandable phrasing
• Keywords used in quick and easy searches
• Length is under 60 characters (titles with 50-60 characters are 30-40% more effective than shorter or longer titles).

Think of the words that a candidate might type into the search box. The job title is what he or she will pay attention to. That’s why it’s so important to be as clear as possible in the title of your advertisement – for example: content manager, office/supply manager, and the like are difficult to misinterpret.

However, by adding clarifying words to them, misunderstanding them will be near impossible. Some examples of such clarifying words might be: Sous Chef (Sea foo experience only), brand content creator/manager, content manager (home office). See those brackets in the titles? They are proven to increase your click-through-rate (CTR).

Use common terms to make the query broader and increase the number of views of your ad. For example, you can use Google Keyword Planner or Google Trends to choose the most common option:

Source: Google Trends

As you can see, the query “content manager” is much more popular than “content specialist,” though these two positions have quite similar meanings. Don’t use abbreviations in a title, as you can use them in the job description as a keyword.

A lot of companies use trends to attract more attention to their ads. For example, once, Apple posted an ad that was titled: “Sr. Armageddon Avoidance Engineer.”

Popular words in titles include:

• Guru
• Ninja
• Wizard
• Jedi
• Zombie
• Genius
• Superhero

Though all of these words make your job posts very attractive and interesting, they don’t work as well as clear and understandable job offers. The reason is simple: ads with such fancy titles attract a lot of clicks from curious people who are not actually interested in applying for the position being offered in it. It also reduces chances of the ad being found by the applicants searching for a position as a junior supply Jedi?

3. Make It Sound Convincing Without Selling It

Many recruiters sometimes forget how job advertisements have all the purposes that any other advertisement has:

• To stimulate the desired action
• To attract attention
• To spread awareness
• To reach a target audience

That’s why a recruiter, as a marketer, has to know how to make their job advertisement appealing and attractive.

Introduction

Start your offer with a short description of your company. A candidate needs to know more about:

• The sphere of your business
• Your location
• The number of your employees
• How long your company is in the business

You might find this information irrelevant, but it isn’t.

Every person is different and has preferences and principles. For example, there are a lot of people who don’t want to work in small and freshly established companies. Instead, they would prefer a job in a big, reliable company with huge amounts of market experience.

The way you describe your company is significant. Choose the tone and words wisely. There is no need to sound too formal.

Keywords

In order to get higher ranking job ads, every recruiter should optimize their job posting through search engines. Search engines check your text for relevant keywords and help applicants to find your offer by title, responsibilities or location. To boost ranking and make more people view your ad, you can incorporate a few keywords, such as:

• We hire students
• No experience required
• Part-time/temporary job
• Graduate
• Support
• Administration
• Scheduling
• Organize
• Location name

Don’t overload a job description with keywords – use them wisely.

Benefits

Mentioning the benefits of working for your company is what a good ad does to attract more applicants. Be sure to incorporate significant advantages and what your company can offer to new employees. You can speak about points like:

• Professional and intellectual growth
• Friendly team
• Exciting, entertaining and educational events
• The significant impact of the company
• Comfortable location and office
• Flexible schedule

A pro tip: If you would like to enhance your advantages even more, you should be more specific. Instead of saying, “professional growth,” say, “the company covers professional training course expenses.”

Your Employees Know Your Best Features

You can ask current employees to help you with creating job advertisements. They can tell you about the most rewarding points of working for your company.

Add every advantage you believe might be relevant to a candidate: qualification training, security, paid vacations, innovative software, etc. Design your main advantages in the form of bullet points.

Other benefits can be mentioned further on in the text. For example, “Our bright and cozy office, enhanced a friendly atmosphere, is situated in a business tower with a parking lot and cafeteria on site. We always make sure to provide advanced software and modern equipment for our team members.”

Numbers Matter

Some companies don’t mention payment range in their ads, and it is a big problem for applicants who want to choose the best option without calling or emailing the recruiters of each and every company. According to a study by Smart Recruit Online, merely mentioning the salary in your ad will increase the number of applicants by 30%.

Making your job offer appealing and attractive is a key point for creating an excellent job advertisement that will get a lot of views and applications.

4. Use a Personal Approach

Any content marketer, if asked about the way to create a successful advertisement, will say that personalization is key. As was mentioned earlier, job posting has the same aim as every other advertisement — to find a target audience and stimulate the desired action. In the case of the job ads, this desired action is the application.

Darcey Cooper, the recruiter of EssayTigers, says:

“It’s essential for us to find creative and responsible people who will enjoy working and being a part of our team. That’s why we try our best to post job ads that will speak directly to a person’s individuality and will spark interest.

We always make sure to specify all benefits that new employees will get with us and what qualities we’re looking for. The main thing we’ve learned is that one can’t just use a standard template for all ads — you need to personalize them. That’s the way to find the right people.”

When reading job advertisements for similar vacancies from different companies, it often seems like reading the same one again and again. Why does it happen? Because many ads are created using templates and standard forms which completely ruin personal approach.

By adjusting your ads for every vacancy and by considering the varying personalities of your target audience, you will receive more views and applications. Think about people who will read your posts and what qualities they have. Personalization is done through the obtainment of information about your candidates. Without obtaining the right information, job ad creation is impossible.

You can also create a job description that will match the atmosphere of your company so a person who is on the same wavelength as the rest of your team will like it. If, for example, you have a team of creative and young people, adjust your ad for people who share these attributes.

• Add a little bit of fun to your ad. A lot of applicants admit that they applied for a particular job because they liked its job description, as it wasn’t formal or boring like many others. Be creative and try to make the description more interesting and humane.

You can also support your ad with visuals. For example, images of your office or team, or a short welcoming video or presentation with main points of what your company is and what people you’re looking for help a lot.

5. Express Your Expectations

Every job ad has to include the list of skills and qualities you expect a candidate to have. This is the way to make it clear for people if they are suitable enough for a particular vacancy or what they need to learn if they want this job.

It’s important to discuss the requirements of every position in your ad. Keep this list as long as it needs to be — your aim is to filter out unqualified candidates. However, be sure to include only realistic and reasonable requirements, so as not to scare away prospect applicants.

Don’t waste yours or the applicant’s time. Be specific about all the essential criteria and what you expect from employees. Don’t crowd all of them in one list. It’s better to create two lists: essential requirements and good-to-have.

When it comes to specifying duties and responsibilities, it’s important to show that all of them are reasonable and are meant to be a part of personal and professional growth.

6. Make It Readable

The main problem with the majority of job ads is lack of readability. Chunky paragraphs and walls of text won’t help you find the best candidate. People just don’t want to spend too much time finding the key points of your offer. So you need to make your text easy to perceive.

Bullet lists, emboldening words, and the usage of italics are your best friends when creating a job advertisement. Make sure to highlight the following sections in your ad:

• Brief company description
• Benefits and advantages
• Requirements
• Responsibilities
• How to apply
• Contacts

Add bullet points and lists, because they are understandable and easy to read. Don’t overload your text with unnecessary information or statistics — remember that every word you use needs to have a specific reason to be there. And keep in mind that the work doesn’t stop after recruitment, employees are always looking for the next best thing and it’s up to you to make sure they don’t have an urge to leave. One way to do this is by using Deputy, an easy to use employee scheduling platform that makes it easy to trade shifts and receive their schedules. To learn more, click on the button below to start your free trial so you can see it in action for yourself.