Recruiter Skills: Writing your Job Advert

You’ve taken your brief with the hiring manager , next up you need to plan how you’re going to fill the role, one of the most underrated tools a recruiter has in their utility belt is the job advert.

I spent the first 10 of my 15 year recruiting career totally not taking job adverts seriously and realising how powerful they can be.

Why? Mostly, I was uneducated when it came to job ads. When I first started recruiting back in my agency days there was a mentality of – get your ad written as quickly as possible, search the database and hit the phones.

Outbound phone activity was one of the key KPIs, if I’d have spent a couple of hours carefully writing a job ad, I’d have probably been marched out the door and I’d definitely not have hit my daily call targets.

There was also no real monetary value to job ads, the agency was buying them in bulk at a ridiculously low price, ROI of ad spend almost didn’t matter. Rubbish copy on a £2 job board credit creates a completely different mindset than posting rubbish content on a £400 job board credit.

So what changed? I’d not long moved inhouse, was spending most of my day sourcing on LinkedIn and still very much blind to the power of a good job advert. I rushed my ads so I could get back to sourcing, but at 40+ live tech vacancies sourcing was proving to be impossible to stay on top of.