Hiring is an incredibly exciting time. Attracting talent to, and growing your team, is huge for your organisation. So why simply write a cut-and-paste job advert that insinuates that there’s a real shortage of creativity? Here’s how to attract the best candidates, through a killer job advert.

1.       #EndTheBuzzwords

We thought it was so important, it needed its own hashtag, right? When Searching through CVs, or applications, how many times do you read ‘Passionate and Enthusiastic’, or, ‘Work well both within a team or independently’. These terms, as you know, hold no weight, and you’d rather see facts, evidence and a spark. This is exactly how Jobseekers feel when reviewing a job advert. With millions of live jobs currently available in the UK, how are you going to make sure you stand out?

Leave the age-old buzzwords from your job advert, and replace these with evidence, and facts. Where you’d usually say ‘Great Employee Perks’ and ‘Great Company Culture’, you can replace with something along the lines of: “Last Friday, all 25 of us got together, went to the local pub, and caught up after a long, productive week. Alan told us about his recent engagement, we learned that Kelly had plans to compete in the up-coming marathon, and we all had a great catch up. Drinks were on us, of course.”

Telling a story is simply the key to increasing candidate engagement and building your employer brand from the moment a jobseeker reads your advert. Telling a story allows the jobseeker to step into the shoes of someone in your organisation, and allows them to already feel a part of the culture. “Last year, our high performers were offered a free trip to Barcelona, all inclusive. It’s important to us that we reward our staff, because we simply wouldn’t be who we are, without them”.

“It was Friday afternoon, 6pm, and the whole office stayed behind to watch Jason vs Jack on the table tennis table. They’d been talking about it all week in the office and the tension was increasing. We simply couldn’t wait to see the outcome. We provided some snacks and a few drinks, and we sat down to watch the grudge match.”

Providing insights, facts, scenarios and evidence of your company culture holds so much weight against just saying there’s a ‘great’ one. Selling your company as an amazing employer isn’t about the selling. It’s simply an explanation of what goes on at HQ, and letting that sell itself to the prospective jobseeker.

2.       Be Clear, and Concise.

If you have set requirements that are business critical for the prospective applicant, you’ll need to place these right at the top of your job advert. Otherwise, they’ll see how much of an awesome company you are, and may even apply anyway. It’s important that your job advert acts as a funnel as you go further down. Each stage of your job description should be designed to filter out candidates that simply wouldn’t work. With this in mind, be realistic. Don’t expect to find a recent Economics Graduate with five years of financial analytics experience.

“We are only accepting applications from candidates that have graduated within the last three years within Economics (or similar) with a 2.1 or above. This is critical for us.”

Once you’ve set the absolute required expectations, you’re now able to list the essential skills required, then follow on to the nice-to-haves.  Being completely clear of the minimum requirements, at the forefront of your job description will not only allow you to increase the relevancy of your applications, but it’ll provide the relevant jobseekers with a positive signal that they could be perfect for the role.

This is where your points from (1) come in. They’re relevant to your role, and here is where you tell the story. The company culture sells itself, and you, through the power of a simple few lines, already place that candidate with an idea on what it’s really like to be within your company culture.

3.       Personal, colloquial, snappy, sweet.

People love people. People don’t usually love something that screams of corporate structure, micromanagement and hierarchy. Although many of these things will exist, by providing your job advert with a highly professional, polished feel, will more often than not, make the jobseeker feel like they’re going to just be a number. How do you combat this?

Be short. Be snappy. Be laid back. Even use appropriate slang. Be on a level with your target audience of jobseekers.

“We’re on the hunt for a total ninja within the field of SEO.”

“We’re looking for someone to come in, and smash the digital marketing space for us. You’ll do this be using your pre-existing knowledge as an Online Marketing guru, contacts coming out of your ears, and our insanely good (if we do say so ourselves) product, in order to provide a reach out to everyone that for some reason, hasn’t heard of us!”

Providing a laid back, conversational tone to your job advert, allows the jobseeker to engage with your advert, your organisation and your employer brand on a personal level, as well as a professional level. This personal level of engagement hits the decision-making process of the jobseeker. It hits the desire emotion, and is the key trigger for the jobseeker to click ‘Apply’ on your advert.

Of course, providing professional elements provides a nice contrast, and of course don’t forget the basics of what you want.

As an overview, provide a key message to the jobseeker that enables you to push your great company culture and employer brand; through story-telling, real-life examples of recent office experiences and allow your job advert to funnel out candidates that couldn’t cut the mustard on an experience, or educational level. We’ve actually written an example modern job advert here!

Select Jobs is a UK Job Board listing over 350,000 live vacancies, with the exclusive option that allows Recruiters to advertise an unlimited amount of vacancies, paying only for what’s delivered to each advert. A re-invented form of job advertising that removes surplus spend from online candidate attraction.