A job advert is more than a job on your careers page
For a few years now I’ve been trying to encourage recruiters to redefine how they see job adverts and job descriptions. And it often feels like trying to attack a castle with a rolled-up newspaper.
That fight will go on until I die.
Being a glutton for punishment, I’m also going to try to redefine what a job advert is. Here goes…
Why I think a job advert is for more than just your website
Most people see a job advert as a piece of content posted to a careers page, job board or any other external site, like LinkedIn. But it’s more than that.
Candidate outreach is also a big sourcing channel – especially for agency recruiters, who generally will make cold approaches to prospective candidates, either to:
- 1. Pitch a job.
- 2. Try to develop a relationship where they can place that person at some point in the future.
Both of those types of message are also ads. The 1st one’s to sell a specific job and the 2nd is to sell the agency or the recruiter.
A job posting and a LinkedIn message are both trying to achieve the same thing, which is to encourage qualified people to want to find out more about a job.
Which means they’re both job adverts. Same goes for a social media post or an email.
The email thing brings me to the 2nd type of message where you’re trying to nurture the prospective candidate into a dialogue, with the ultimate aim of pitching a job to them at some point further down the road.
The potential candidates that come from that 2nd type of message are going to be people where you should get an almost 100% response rate when you send them your 1st type of message.
I’m saying all this because our training course often gets called “Job Advert Training” which is too limiting in its ambition.
Once you learn how to structure and write a decent job ad, you’ll automatically know how to also structure and write an InMail, email and social media post.
If you would like more thoughts and musings on recruitment, you might want to download Mitch’s free book “On Recruitment”.
