Writing great online recruitment adverts
Online advertising: it’s brutally honest. Behind the fancy lingo your account handler has been using – no clicks, no hits, no views – are some very simple home truths: no one found your advert, no one has read it, and those that did didn’t apply. Ouch.
And you’re not alone. Many traditional advertising agency copywriters aren’t doing online well – they just don’t know how. Luckily, help is at hand.
Our clients rely on the expertise of our copywriters to create effective online recruitment adverts. Our global service model has shared service centres which draw on onshore and offshore resources, improving the quality of the work and the turnaround time. Here, Wojciech and Padraic, members of our global Creative team based in Krakow, Poland, offer some solid advice to get your copy in shape.
“Online recruitment copy needs to be focused on attracting interest from a defined target audience, communicating appealing and relevant points quickly and clearly, and providing a clear call to action. The classic AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) formula is a great guide here.
Good online copy must be optimised for searchability so that it attracts attention from appropriate job seekers. The four concepts of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – prominence, proximity, density, frequency – need to be kept in mind here. At the same time, it’s crucial to write for people, not search engines: no one wants to read spam, no matter how relevant a search engine tells us it is.
Since most job seekers scan recruitment related advertisements, not reading them in full the first time, attracting and holding the interest of your target audience is even more challenging online. You need to establish relevance in the ideal candidate’s mind quickly by telling them ‘what’s in it for me’. That means building your copy around the most interesting points, and presenting these in a concise and compelling way.
Once there’s interest, it’s time to create desire – readers need to be convinced that they are suitable, and that the job is a fantastic opportunity. It’s crucial that your unique selling point is in fact a unique selling point, not a generic claim true of every role in a given discipline, or a claim that’s totally unsupported or too regularly given to be credible in the reader’s eyes (‘great, dynamic company’). It must be exactly what it sounds like: a unique (not generic) selling (something the reader will want, not something the company is asking for) point (singular, not an unedited list).
Finally, once you’ve sold the role to the ideal readership your next task is to prompt action. As with the rest of the copy, the call to action must be clear. Whether you’re re-directing the reader to another page or asking them to submit their CV, the prompt to action is the last thing in the advert and should encourage immediate response.”