Are you looking for employees to help expand your business? Make sure you avoid falling foul of getting anything less than the best job ad out there, and improve your chances of getting the best candidates!
- Careless Grammar – There’s no excuse for careless grammar. When putting out a job ad you are presenting your business to anyone who sees the ad, whether they are looking for it or not. Poor grammar = poor results.
- Focus – In the advert focus on what you actually need. Be specific and straight to the point. Do you need someone who is a team player with a positive determined attitude? Or do you need someone who has a specific skill set and a positive personality? Tell it as straight as possible - applicants will appreciate the directness much more than a paragraph of jargon.
- Copying – Spending time creating a job description which will stand out from the crowd is key to drawing in the candidates. Make the job sound brilliant by pointing out the most attractive parts to entice candidates in. Copying and pasting the job description from your own internal system is a mistake. Who wants to read a list of endless bullet points?
- Make yourself known – The worst thing that can be done when writing a job description is missing out the part where you talk about the company. You want to make potential candidates think “Wow! I want to work for them”. If you’re a small business, there’s every chance the candidate knows nothing about you.
- Realistic goals – Do you really need someone who has got 4 years’ experience? Or would someone with 2 years’ experience be able to do what you need them to? Try not to set the goal posts too high, you could have lost the best employee because they only had 2 years’ experience.
- I want you – This is very much a two-way street. Your job ad should read as though you want them to work for you and they should want to work for you too. Some ads can be condescending, which you need to be careful of. Yes they should want to work for you but they shouldn’t feel like they are the lucky one.
- No Incentives – The best of the best will always be looking for bonuses but if you don’t mention them, they aren’t going to know, meaning possibly less applications. Even if you can’t compete with the bigger company bonuses it will do no harm to mention that bonuses are available.
- Proofread – There’s nothing worse than spell check not picking up on a misspelt word because it’s a word on its own. “Tart time”? Maybe you meant “Start time”? Or even “Part Time”?
- No Salary details – Including a salary in the ad is usually a must. You may not have decided on how much you will pay yet but putting a rough guideline in (between £20,000 - £23,000) is more enticing than having nothing there at all.
