Why post a job description and expect it to behave like a job advert?
The answer to this question is multifaceted – like most answers to most questions.
The two broadest categories of answer are probably laziness and ignorance.
Laziness
Because the recruiter is overworked and can barely process all their vacancies alongside all their other responsibilities.
Or it could be that they’re just playing the numbers game.
Or that they work for a large well-known company and expect that to be what candidates find most attractive about their jobs.
In other words, they don’t think they need to sell their jobs and believe that all most potential candidates want is lots of information about the company and the job responsibilities.
Ignorance
Because they don’t know any better.
And they don’t know anything about marketing or sales.
Basically, they don’t see any difference between a job advert and a job description and see them as interchangeable. That one means the other. To take it to the extreme conclusion, they think ‘advert’ and ‘description’ are synonyms.
There are many ways of defining the difference between a job advert and a job description. The most obvious one is that an advert ‘sells‘ and a description ‘tells‘.
Most people need a good reason to actually want to read a 900 word job description and the best of those reasons is that it’s a job they’re interested in.
Fundamentally, the purpose of the job advert is to make potential candidates to want to read the job description.
If you’d like to develop your recruitment writing skills, take a look at our job ad writing courses.
