Recruitment Jobs: Creating Effective Adverts For The Internet

By: John Bult
The nature of recruitment advertising has changed dramatically within the last 6 years. During this time I have been in both recruitment, and the jobs board business constantly analysing the effectiveness if different channels to advertise vacancies for both our own medical sales vacancies, and also the recruitment vacancies on our recruitment jobs board.

Without question, internet advertising is now the most effective form of advertising for any recruiter. To clarify ‘effective’, it’s relatively much cheaper than any other form of advertising, in some cases up to ten times cheaper than paper, and it produces more, maybe ten plus times the volume of response. You can read many statistic about how many people would use the internet to find a job. In most markets, I reckon it’s pretty much everyone now. How many people do you know who don’t have a broadband connection (ie. ‘always on’ at a fixed price). Surely most or all of these would browse the internet looking for a job?

One can browse 100s of sector specific jobs over a cup of tea, even a beer in the comfort of your own home, without having to buy magazines and papers each week, in a very short space of time. Find the right sites and you won’t even have to do this, the site will e-mail you or even send you a text when a suitable job is posted.

I’m not so sure that recruitment agencies have yet latched on the magnitude of the change with many still spending huge amounts on paper advertising, when the cost of just one paper advert could cover an array of internet sites which would likely produce so much more. I feel there is still a perception that ‘paper’ advertising is the best medium for creating profile within a market.

In addition to this, the nature of advertising itself is very different and this requires a very different approach. We have noticed that recruitment consultants posting job adverts in the same style as they would have posted a paper advert gain a relatively poor response. The reason for this, we believe, is that a candidate browsing the internet, can view vast numbers of ‘very’ similar jobs in a very short space of time, compared with the relatively slow process of rustling through pages of different adverts to find the one that they want. On the internet, one can set filters to raise a whole basket of matching jobs easily. It them comes down picking a job that stands out.

Unfortunately, the task of writing adverts is not the most exciting of recruitment activities. The consequence is that many jobs are all rather bland, and to the reader might just as well be the same. For example, a typical recruitment consultant vacancy may look like this

Recruitment Consultant Our client requires a graduate with two years recruitment experience. You will have ABC experience and qualifications and be able to achieve 1,2 3 targets.

Firstly here, the title, reads exactly the same as almost every other title for a recruitment consultant vacancy. Secondly, the job itself almost reads like a set of demands simply reeling off a basket of client and job requirements. Consider the following advert on a page with 20 others written as above.

Recruitment with a difference! An open ended bonus structure, excellent career prospects, autonomy within your role and free membership of our neighbouring health club. These are some of the benefits you will receive working for *** Ltd.

Ideally you will have a degree…

In the first instance, this advert will scoop almost all the clicks from the vacancy page in front of all the others. Once on the advert, it will gain a significantly higher application rate. So what are the tangible components of this successful advert which generate the response.

Job titles

The job title needs to look different, plane old ‘recruitment consultant’ just is enticing enough and it will be a numbers game as to how many click this advert. The more ‘personality’ you can give it the better, it just depends how whacky your prepared to make it look. ‘You won’t find a better job than this!’ Will attract a lot more clicks, but may be incompatible and too informal for your corporate style, but the principle stands, the more personality you can give it, the more clicks it will get.

Job content

Jobs which begin with strong candidate ‘benefits’ attract a lot more applications than those which focus simply on client/job requirements. Obviously client and job requirements have to be in the advert, but put them after the candidate benefits. If your not sure how this job should be attractive to a candidate, it’s time to call your client and ask them why people should work for them, rather than somebody else.

If you follow these two basic principles, we reckon you could increase your response five fold.

Good luck

This article is written by John Bult of Recruitment Vacancies

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