“It depends.” That’s probably the most common start to an answer I give to any question I get in relation to our copywriting training programmes. “How long should my job ad be?” “It depends. Who’s the target audience and how much info do you need to share with them?” “What tone of voice should I…
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One of the things I’ve learnt over the years is that effective recruitment is usually the result of lots of small marginal gains. If looked at in isolation, these small margins might seem to be trivial or inconsequential. But when looked at collectively, they’ll often be the difference between filling a job first time and it…
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If you want to write better job ads, you need to be having more conversations like this one with hiring managers. OK, not exactly like this, but close. Just minus the sarcasm and swearing. Recruiter: “Thanks for sending over the job description. Is now a good time for us to talk this through?” Hiring Manager: “Why do…
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‘Institutional Corporate Arrogance’ is a phrase I came up with a few years back, after years spent looking for reasons why so many companies struggle to attract enough people from their job ads. But before I explain what it means, I first need to put this struggle into some kind of context. If you were to…
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What job boards are good at is processing job ads. What they’re bad at is giving advice on how to write those job ads. Do you know why most of the advice from job boards about writing job ads is wrong? It’s because their primary concern is to have the job ad repeat as many…
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Around 75% of all job postings describe the job as “fantastic” or an “exciting opportunity”. Curiously, only about 10% of all job postings tell the reader why the job is fantastic or exciting. The missing 15% are people who go to the effort of finding synonyms for “fantastic” and “exciting”. If you’d like to be…
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This video is a snippet of a webinar where Mitch Sullivan answers questions about copywriting for recruiters. Here’s what he says: Make it about the candidate. Be very explicit about what’s in it for them. And don’t bury the good stuff at the bottom of the ad. Sometimes I see ads and right at the…
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One of the things that characterises the inhouse recruitment community is their willingness to come together at events like RecFest and Tru to share experiences and learning. Why don’t their agency counterparts do the same thing and share some of their best practices? Are they worried they’re going to give away some kind of magic…
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I can only guess at the origin of this virus. It might have been started by one organism or it might have mutated from something else. If it was the first, then my guess would be an agency big-biller encouraging everyone around them to copy their phone spiel – probably back in the 90s. Or…
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Are you looking for Gen Z candidates? That is, someone born between mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s. They’re also known as ‘Zoomers’ and ‘digital natives’. Let’s temporarily put aside the fact that you can’t recruit based on age because that’s ageist and against the law (Equality Act 2010). And let’s, just for this post,…
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When people type “how to create a job description” into Google, what many of them really mean is “how to create a job advert”. If you’re one of these people, this article is for you. However, if you are actually looking for help on how to put together a job description, there are some links…
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There are two types of “best job description”. One type of “best job description” is a piece of content that clearly and unambiguously lays out all of the details about a job, what its overall purpose is, the tasks that need doing regularly, who and what the job interacts with, the skills needed, etc. Its…
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One of the things that frustrates me about my industry is its proclivity to conflate two very different pieces of content: a job advert and a job description. Posting job descriptions and expecting your target candidates to read them doesn’t work like it did back in the early days of the Internet and job boards.…
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I recently did some coaching work with a recruiter. One of the things I urged him to do was invest a small amount of money in a copywriter to produce a job ad for one of his better clients – let’s call them Client A. I wanted him to see the difference in performance between…
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I saw a job posting today for a Full Stack Developer. Those kinds of jobs aren’t easy to fill, are they? Anyway… This particular job posting was 368 words long and broken down into the following subheadings: The Job Role: This is where they told a Full Stack Developer what a Full Stack Developer typically…
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I love it when recruitment people talk about wanting to build or develop “a brand” for their agency. I don’t really love it. It drives me mad. I don’t think recruiters (or worse, recruitment marketers) know what Brand means. I didn’t either, so I looked it up. Here’s what Seth Godin thinks Brand means: “A brand is…
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Before writing this blog, I crowdsourced the opinions of anyone who cared to express one. I was surprised by the results. I was expecting more recruiters to say that the only way to find passive candidates was to source them directly. I was especially encouraged by the comments posted by non-recruiters (also sometimes known as ‘candidates’ and ‘clients’)…
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Recruitment can sometimes be quite boring. It’s a relentless sausage factory, pumping out hour after hour of tedious tasks; sales, processing, sifting, chasing, smiling, chatting, handshaking, presenting, travelling, meeting. Some of the more happy-clappy of you may disagree that all those tasks are tedious. But trust me, they’ll become tedious once you’ve been doing this…
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I sometimes see job ads where the recruiter is at least trying to sell the job. But sometimes it just looks plain ugly. More on this at the end. One of the many ways of getting your ad noticed and then read, is to ask the reader a question. Typically, these would be questions that…
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Ask any agency recruiter and they’ll probably tell you that they believe they’re better at finding the best candidates than most hiring companies – regardless of whether those hiring companies have their own internal recruitment function. If you’ve ever looked at job ads or received any messages from recruiters, you might struggle to agree with…
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