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Job advertising: how to market jobs and win top talent

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There is a lot more to job advertising than simply writing a few paragraphs. My not so favourite tasks – the pasting a whole job description and posting on a job board – also don’t sum up. Many employed in the fields of advertising and marketing can attest that our careers are beyond knowing how to write a job advertisement.

If not done properly, you will then experience a mix of results ranging from too few responses, wrong candidates applying, too many wrong candidates, or no ideal candidates applying. There are 15 key ingredients…

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Job advertisement and marketing tips

job advertisingWhen selling a house, you only need one buyer. However in recruitment, you not only need one buyer, you actually need ‘the ideal buyer’.

Because you want to recruit the right candidate, you must create the most compelling message and offer. Then make sure you target the right candidates.

You must maximise the exposure of your message so that you capture the widest yet most targeted audience. There are many key ingredients that will ensure the success of your job advertisement. However, get any one of these wrong and you risk losing valuable candidates.

My job advertising strategy

In over 18 years of recruiting and job ad copywriting, here are the 15 key areas that have allowed me to get great results for clients:

How to write a job advertisement

  1. Have a well-defined Position Description including salary range & benefits
  2. Have a Person Specification with 3-6 essential and preferable skills  and attributes
  3. The Job Title must be meaningful, descriptive and marketable
  4. Create a compelling 150 character teaser (or “lead-in”) to capture the attention of job seekers. Then give them a reason to “click through” to the main advertisement
  5. Craft up 3 compelling bullet points that best describe the opportunity and benefits of applying
  6. In the body of the advert describe the company, why it exists, what it does and points of difference – what is the culture and why would the reader want to work there?
  7. Describe the job opportunity and summarise why it exists and what it does.

Job advertising in action

  1. Selection Criteria: Describe the key skills and attributes required to successfully undertake this role

    job advertising and marketing

    Reader hit in the face. Shocking assault causes an emotional response.

  2. Provide a closing date and any other information to help candidates apply
  3. Select the job location, job classification and subclassification. Research all the available classifications and sub-classifications
  4. Check to see if there are additional locations, job classifications and sub-classifications relevant to this job and be prepared to use more than one to capture the market
  5. Research comparative jobs to ensure your salary level is competitive
  6. If your remuneration package is competitive, publish it to generate a higher response rate. If it is marginally or less competitive, do not publish it
  7. Enter the engagement method (eg part-time, full time, casual, fixed term contract etc)
  8. Is the job board you are using where your preferred candidates ‘hang out’? Some of the best candidates don’t apply via major job boards. Therefore, posting on multiple job boards will ensure your exposure to the widest applicable candidate markets

For more information on how to craft compelling and effective job advertising, contact Neil at 1300Hired. [/read]

How a disrupted business became a disruptor!

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In my previous article, I described how my recruitment and labour-hire business was disrupted in 4 separate ways and how the fourth stage of disruption, in fact, disrupted the first!

This didn’t help my recruitment and labour-hire business which serviced large national and multi-national clients in the engineering, mining and construction sectors.

In a nutshell, the advent of internal recruitment teams and increased competition for a smaller piece of the recruitment pie, meant shrinking revenues and shrinking margins in all service areas. This created a double whammy. The writing was on the wall.

The solution was defined in the problem itself. We needed to get to businesses that didn’t have the internal recruitment team. We wanted to get to businesses that didn’t have one or more of the people, financial or time expertise to do their own recruitment, and do it professionally and cost-effectively.

We knew that most firms wouldn’t have a recruitment or HR resource until they were some 70-100 strong, and even then many didn’t have the budget to recruit effectively.

We then defined the market as small to medium enterprises (SME’s) which were between 10-199 people in size. To our surprise our research showed that this was a huge market with about 95% of all Australian businesses in the SME category.

We also knew that SME’s were a lot tighter financially in terms of available funds for recruiting and generally, and our experience also showed that the smaller the business, the less breadth of expertise exists compared to a larger business.

Putting this all together, we decided that we had to either transform our existing business, or create a new one. We wanted the new business to:

  • Have very attractive fee structures
  • Be the lowest cost operation
  • Have compelling value propositions for SME’s
  • Be scaleable nationally
  • Deliver great candidates

A traditional recruitment business typically has full time salaried consultants working from leased offices with traditional office infrastructure, cars and car parking costs. Clients are charged high fees (usually 10-20% of salary package). In contrast to this we needed to deliver value to SME’s and this required a whole new mindset involving:

Provide fixed flat fee services

Engaging part-time specialist consultants

Working remotely, connected via cloud

Use the latest in technology

What we also did was analyse all the steps in the recruitment process and measure the activities and costs needed to deliver them. What we found was astounding and enlightening. It was enlightening because it highlighted the huge inefficiencies of “traditional recruitment”. It provided a huge opportunity cut out up to 90% in inefficient methods and previously accepted “recruitment practices”.

With quantum leaps across all aspects of the new business, this meant not only creating a new business but the acceptance of a quantum shift in thinking and a completely new mindset . Enter the belief system, culture and business model that is 1300Hired.

Personally speaking, I have been on a journey to transform myself as leader of one business from “the old school” and into the leader of a new business which is quantum shift from the old ways. It is also hugely disruptive to those invested in the old “% of salary package” recruitment business model. SME’s love us and recruiters hate us.

This has not been an instant transformation, rather it is a deliberate and planned journey towards what I believe will become accepted and mainstream in the future – until the next disruption!