Are you downplaying the features in your job ads?
One of the things I’ve learnt from doing over 350 coaching sessions with recruiters is they don’t do enough with their job features.
In particular, those job features that might be the thing that attracts someone to apply.
Here’s an example:
“This role has great career options.”
Lots of job posts say something like this. Is it true? And who’s deciding that it’s “great”?
If it is true, get the data. You can learn how to get better at doing that here.
Let’s assume it is true and that 3 of the previous 5 people who did this job have since been promoted.
Then your sentence can become:
“60% of the people who’ve done this job have been promoted.”
There’s nothing clever about this sentence, it’s just stating a fact. Also, the benefit is implicit. It’s implying the reader could also get promoted.
To make sure the message really lands, you could make it explicit by adding another sentence like:”
“Fancy increasing those odds to 66.67%?”
That could work particularly well for a job that involved good number skills.
So, to put it all together:
“60% of the people who’ve done this job have been promoted. Fancy increasing those odds to 66.67%?”
Chances are, by the time you’ve finished writing your ad, those two sentences will be the strongest. Then you have to make sure that everyone who looks at the ad will read both of them.
That means not putting them in the middle of the 3rd paragraph from the bottom. It means putting them right at the top of the body copy.
Creativity isn’t a special gift. It’s about thinking about things in the right way. Every single good writer I’ve ever known has been a good thinker. Not one exception.
You can learn how to build that thinking muscle on one of our online recruitment marketing courses.
If you would like more thoughts and musings on recruitment, you might want to download Mitch’s free book “On Recruitment”.
