Job Ad Copywriting Tips

Attract Top Talent with these 3 Actionable Job Ad Copywriting Tips

Kelly Barcelos on November 30, 2020 in Recruitment Strategy

In the highly competitive job market that is becoming ever increasingly globalized, how do you make your job description stand out? How do you attract the best talent to your team as efficiently and quickly as possible?

It all starts with the humble job ad. It’s the introduction a candidate will have to your company, and first impressions count for candidates who are browsing through a seemingly endless stream of positions.

With that in mind, here are 3 copywriting techniques that companies have used over the years to hire writers at content writing service that can help your job description bring in the candidates you want.

  1. Sell the job like a vacation.

    In past generations, “work-life” and “real life” didn’t mix much, but today, thanks to technology, even personal components of our lives are mixed in with our job. You could be making dinner while on the phone with a colleague, or messaging your kids while waiting for a meeting to get started. What impact does this have on a job posting?

    Well, it means that when you describe a job, you are also describing the candidate’s potential future personal life. How will the employee live? What schedule will they keep? While job descriptions of the past pitched “vacation time,” today’s job posts can pitch “staycation” time, flex hours, and integrative lifestyle management.

    What life will the candidate be walking into? How will they wake up in the morning? Will their day be fast-paced, or with a coffee and the paper? Will they have a long commute or work from home? What is their experience when they walk into the office? Do they have get-right-to-it meetings and snapping customers or big smiles?

    In your job post, pitch the position like it’s a vacation: walk them through a typical day, describing the mood, expectations, and all the support that they’ll get.

  2. Be direct about the work involved.

    Once you’ve got the employee’s life painted beautifully before their eyes like an image of a life of their dreams, you can try to align your offerings in terms of professional fulfillment.

    What does “professional fulfillment” mean? It means you help the employee to end their day thinking, “This is what I have been working up to all my professional life. This is what I was trained to do. My talents and intelligence are being utilized, and I am putting my skills to the challenge.”

    Think of it this way: If an impressive employee is putting in hours in return for a great salary only, would that be enough? No, it wouldn’t be. The person is an individual who put in years of effort to be seated at the desk you gave them.
    Thus, include in the job description a refined list of character traits, skills, abilities, and talents that your self-confident employee will have worked on and want to use. It’s a way of giving them respect and showing them that the salary and benefits they receive are hard-won.

    Remember to add a small note admitting the flexibility of these expectations. No candidate is a perfect match for a company’s expectations, and you can and should be clear about the fact that you welcome applicants who are a bit outside of your “box”.

  3. Promote personal and professional growth

    People are retiring later in life than they did previously. Some people are invested in their careers and do not want to stop working. The more individualized and unique a person’s job the more they yearn to continue being challenged. Therefore, the final comment for your dream candidate in your job description can be: “Will the journey ever end?”

    The answer you want to give them is, “No.” Explain in point form how the company will continue to enrich and challenge their professional lives throughout their life span. Tell them about courses, professional development retreats, new technology, and development in the company, the supportive culture, and the ways you’d love to see your employee grow without even having met him or her yet.

    In our era, recruiters can remember that they are not just seeking to fill a role. Rather, they are promising a potential candidate a special life, one of their dreams which they have worked hard to develop.

    The recruiter should be honest and place thought into the kind of life that will help the employee. With enough consideration and effort in “putting yourself into the employee’s shoes,” you can create a job description anyone would want to work and live for.

Kelly Barcelos

Kelly Barcelos is a progressive digital marketing manager specializing in HR and is responsible for leading Jobsoid’s content and social media team. When Kelly is not building campaigns, she is busy creating content and preparing PR topics. She started with Jobsoid as a social media strategist and eventually took over the entire digital marketing team with her innovative approach and technical expertise.