What is your prospective candidates likely profile:

Thinking like the person you’d ideally like to hire is essential, they will need to see your advert so it will need to be identifiable by them as relevant and contain at least some of the key words they search for. When they see it, your advert will also have to resonate with them, (whoever they are). For example, if you want someone who will ideally move into a leadership role but begin as purely hands on then the advert is more likely to resonate with the right person if it talks about ‘leadership training’ rather than ‘leadership responsibilities.

Be sure to check if your internal job title is consistent in the wider industry, it will very likely need a tweak to remove internally used phrases! They also don’t know why you chose to join, enjoy your job, are looking for someone or how your team add value to the business.

Everyone skim reads everything and candidates will have to decide to click on your job based on it’s title and first few sentences. Moreover your job will feature within a list, it’s position will depend on multiple factors but a principal one is relevance. For example if you are trying to hire an Account Manager it will likely get lost amongst the various types of Account Manager roles out there. The role is still an Account Manager but can be given context, “Account Manager – IT Services”. It may also help to repeat and/or include variations in the advert text, for the above example the opening line may read; “Account Manager for IT services sales required to join…….” Typically this would get your advert on the first page of results for searches like Account Manager, IT” OR “Account Manager, Sales”.

Very often adverts end up as a list of demands such as “Must have…..” & “would be beneficial” etc.

It’s also important to give an ideally positive introduction to the company and attempt at what people might enjoy most if they get the job. If you get stuck, think about why you work there and what you enjoy most.

As a professional recruitment agency we understand the complications of advertising a job position that your existing employees or competitors might see.  However, this is one of the main thing’s candidates search for, please include it as a rough guide.

Undertake research of similar roles that are being advertised and analyse the keywords being used by other recruiters.  You want your job advert to be viewed by prospective candidates so include general keywords which similarly apply.  Also think laterally about the job role and how your prospective candidate may search for it - it might not be the same as you have positioned it!

As with point 4, people will skim read your job and if it is too long and not find readily identifiable information they wish to purse with applying then they will move on.  In depth information can be introduced when you first converse with the candidate either over the intial telephone interview or first face to face interview.