One of the biggest problems with the vast majority of recruiting narratives (job adverts, outreach messages, etc.) is that they are positioned to appeal mostly to actively job-seeking audiences. I recently finished reading ‘Direct Leads’ by Michael Masterson and John Forde, which introduced me to Eugene Schwartz’s concept of the 5 stages of customer awareness.…
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A few weeks back I was reading an agency website that claimed they were better than their competitors because they “cut through the noise” and are able to attract better quality candidates. Then the acid test. I read their job ads. All of them looked like this and included long lists of demands (“you will…
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There are few people who think that having an engaged and motivated workforce isn’t a good thing. The problem is, the concept is quite new and with the exception of a few disruptive tech companies who have sandpits in their canteens and a pool table in the boardroom, most businesses have been around long enough…
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Recycling plastic is good. When people regularly see you doing it, they’re gradually buying into the notion that you’re a good person who cares about the planet. Recycling clichés is bad. When people regularly see you doing this, they’re buying into the notion that you’re just like all those recruiters they’ve had bad experiences with.…
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First, you need to find experts in the 3 main subject areas. These are, in no particular order: Then, you’ll need to choose a tried-and-tested copywriting formula to base the training on. We went with A.I.D.A. because it’s over 100 years’ old and has stood the test of time, which is a bit like us. Adapt…
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If ever there was a place to blow our own trumpet for the Copywriting for Recruiters courses, we think our blog is it. Tom Mason at AO.com Where else will you find a course that prompts Tom Mason at AO.com to say: “I’ve had a look at the performance of our sales advert since I’ve been…
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The image below shows what the UK Government website says must be included in a job ad. One of the things the law says is that you should state minimum experience levels. However, specifying the number of years experience in a job ad can expose your organisation to claims of age discrimination. So there’s a…
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You’re trying to persuade (the right) people to reply to your job ads. The Ancient Greek philosopher (384–322 BC) recommended three principles of persuasion that still apply today: 1. Logos: Logic and reason2. Pathos: Emotional appeal3. Ethos: Character and credibility 1. Logic and reason People make rational decisions about which jobs to apply for. Appeal to…
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What would an excitable Accountant look like? Someone who wets their pants when they see a profit-and-loss report? What about a passionate Project-Manager? Someone who gets hot under the collar about Gantt charts? Is that really the kind of applicant you want? No, of course not. Those kinds of people are nutters. That’s assuming they…
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I hear this a lot from recruiters. Yet it doesn’t seem to stop most of them posting lots of job ads. Maybe they’ve bought into the ‘chuck enough mud’ recruitment principle – a principle made popular by the invention and easy accessibility of job boards. Another popular phrase I hear from recruiters is “We don’t advertise…
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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) says all ads should be: “Legal, decent, honest and truthful”. We were asked whether anyone has ever been sued for writing dishonest job ads. Here’s what we found: Job ads that don’t exist Ten years ago, Ian Johnson was sentenced to 30 weeks’ imprisonment and Ronald Clark was sentenced to…
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Bear with me on this one. It must be searingly obvious to anyone who works in the hiring business that recruitment agencies have received quite a lot of flak over the past few years – some of it caused by oafish sales tactics and some of it by their diminishing ability to deliver a viable…
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If you ever see a job advert use the term “the incumbent”, run, click away, swipe left… Companies who talk like this hate you. They see you as one of the great unwashed and they think they’re doing you a favour by having a job vacancy. They have an HR department that is still called…
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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…
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Over the past few months I’ve seen lots of posts on LinkedIn from recruiters advising job seekers on things like how to get noticed, how to write their CV and how to connect with (or respond to) recruiters. Nothing wrong with any of that. Much of it has been well intentioned. But, it begs the…
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When talking about tone of voice, Innocent Drinks is often held up as a paragon of virtue. Until it comes to their recruitment copywriting and job ads. Here are the opening lines of the first 5 ads on their site recently: Group Finance Reporting Manager “Innocent is growing up and maturing from a big little…
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Moist monkeys are to blame. Have you heard that story about monkeys in a cage, with bananas and a ladder? Any time they tried to go up the ladder to get the delicious bananas, sadistic scientists would hose the lot of them down. They hated that. Who wouldn’t? So the monkeys soon stopped trying. After…
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Sometimes I think the one big safety-pin that’s holding the 3rd party recruitment industry together is the widely-held belief that the best candidates (aka “talent”) are currently doing the same job for a similar company. Let’s be honest here – what’s really attractive about candidates already doing the same job somewhere else is that they’re seen…
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You’ve no doubt heard about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. That version was based on GPT-3.5. A new and improved version was released in March 2023 based on GPT-4. ChatGPT is designed to mimic human conversation, although OpenAI acknowledges that it: “Sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or…
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Phishing. Nobody needs that shit. When I first came into recruitment, most of our candidates came from fake job ads. They were fake because each one was an amalgam of different jobs we were working on and were really just telling a certain type of candidate that the agency was open for business. You could…
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