Insights

A job description and a job advert are two different things.

One of the things that frustrates me about my industry is its proclivity to conflate these two pieces of content. Posting job descriptions and expecting your target candidates to read them doesn’t work like it did back in the early days of the Internet and job boards. The novelty of being able to find job…

A Testimonial for Copywriting

I recently did some coaching work with a recruiter. One of the things I urged him to do was invest a small amount of money in a copywriter to produce a job ad for one of his better clients – let’s call them Client A. I wanted him to see the difference in performance between…

Are we buying or selling?

I saw a job posting today for a Full Stack Developer. Those kinds of jobs aren’t easy to fill, are they? Anyway… This particular job posting was 368 words long and broken down into the following subheadings: The Role: This is where they told a Full Stack Developer what a Full Stack Developer typically does every…

Brand this.

I love it when recruitment people talk about wanting to build or develop “a brand” for their agency. I don’t really love it. It drives me mad. I don’t think recruiters (or worse, recruitment marketers) know what Brand means. I didn’t either, so I looked it up. Here’s what Seth Godin thinks Brand means: “A brand is…

Do passive candidates read job adverts?

Before writing this blog, I crowdsourced the opinions of anyone who cared to express one. I was surprised by the results. I was expecting more recruiters to say that the only way to find passive candidates was to source them directly. I was especially encouraged by the comments posted by non-recruiters (also sometimes known as candidates and clients)…

Do you have an artistic side?

Recruitment can sometimes be quite boring. It’s a relentless sausage factory, pumping out hour after hour of tedious tasks; sales, processing, sifting, chasing, smiling, chatting, handshaking, presenting, travelling, meeting. Some of the more happy-clappy of you may disagree that all those tasks are tedious. But trust me, they’ll become tedious once you’ve been doing this…

How do I get someone to read my job ads?

I sometimes see job ads where the recruiter is at least trying to sell the job. But sometimes it just looks plain ugly. More on this at the end. One of the many ways of getting your ad noticed and then read, is to ask the reader a question. Typically, these would be questions that…

How talent might be reading your job ads, emails and LinkedIn messages.

Ask any agency recruiter and they’ll probably tell you that they believe they’re better at finding the best candidates than most hiring companies – regardless of whether those hiring companies have their own internal recruitment function. If you’ve ever looked at job ads or received any messages from recruiters, you might struggle to agree with…

I’ve got your SEO right here.

This is a job post. More specifically, it’s a job post for a Business Development Manager written to be as SEO friendly as possible… Business Development ManagerLondonBusiness Services Are you a Business Development Manager who would like to work for a successful company managing and developing new business? Our client is a dynamic market leader and are…

Improving the odds

Recruitment advertising has one big advantage over other forms of direct response advertising. A recruitment ad only needs to find one customer. Most companies and recruiters know this (if only subconsciously) although many expect to find 3 or 4 from which they can choose the one. I think this can cause people (Hiring Managers, HR,…

Is LinkedIn contributing to the dumbing down of the recruitment sector?

Today I saw this doing the rounds on LinkedIn. It’s an article on how to attract candidates to your job postings, written by one of LinkedIn’s staff writers. Judging by some of the responses, some people were getting giddy with excitement – presumably about how they’re now going to be able to write better job ads.…

Is there a place for swearing in recruitment advertising?

The short answer is ‘yes’ and the long answer is ‘it depends’. Let’s take a closer look at the long answer. I doubt too many people would argue that the purpose of ad copy is to sell a proposition in as few words as is necessary to get the reader to take some kind of…

12 →

Insights

What’s your goal today?