Today we are going to talk about how to write a job ad. Sounds simple but you’d be surprised how many get it wrong. Look through any of the job boards and you will quickly see, that very few people know how to write a job advertisement. In this post we are going to run through a few points on what to do and what not to do when writing a job advertisement.
Sell NOT Scare
The job advertisement is a selling mechanism and isn’t the start of your in-depth nazi like interview process. It is the first insight any candidate gets of your organisation. Think of it like the menu in a window of a restaurant. It is there to entice people who are suitable to come in and talk. It has to be warm and inviting.
Be Concise
There are over 58 million tweets sent per day, and 1 tweet = a max of 140 characters. There are 144 million Facebook posts every day. The average length of a Facebook post is approx. 200 characters. The audience are become accustomed to finding our information quickly. they don’t want to read 9 paragraphs and more to the point, they won’t.
Become skilled at getting the message across with less words. Remember that saying, LESS IS MORE.
Spelling
There is no excuse for bad spelling and grammar. Everything you type on these days has spell checker, even the job boards. Incorrect spelling and poor grammar is unforgivable in a job advertisement. This is a big issue given the writing of the job ad is often given to an underling somewhere who is used to typing “btw” instead of “by the way”.
Structure
Introduction – Body – Close – Call to Action
- Use the intro to outline why they should join your company and the best bits of the role. This NEEDS to be concise and compelling as the ready will not go beyond this stage if it isn’t.
- The body is used for the nitty-gritty of the role and qualifications/experience required.
- The close is to wrap it all up
- The call to action is what they have to do to apply.
Application Process
In the call to action it is a very good idea to briefly outline the application process e.g.
“Interviews will be conducted during the week of September 7”.
Why it show the reader that you are serious (there are a lot of “un-true” jobs advertised out there) and it makes you stand out from everyone else.
Decency
Please, please, please, treat your applicants the way you would like to be treated. It doesn’t matter if they are from Bangladesh, they are a person and deserve to be treated in a decent manner. And that means, they need to be contacted. If you don’t have a system to be able to contact each of the applicants even to reject them, then buy one (call us we can help), or don’t do the recruitment yourself. There are too many people inserting “only successful candidates will be contacted” into job advertisements now and its WRONG. If you are going to run this recruitment process, then do it properly.
Recruitment School is Australia’s leading Online Recruitment Training facility. Our aim is to provide brilliant training, at a realistic price, with added flexibility. To find out more click here to be taken to our courses page
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