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Too Much Anonymity? - Stating Salary / Salary Range - Factual Info to Include - Differentiating your Company - Seniority of the Position - How Much to Write?

The Web offers a very different medium to paper for advertising vacancies. Perhaps the biggest difference for the advertiser is that you no longer have to worry about cramming all you have to say about your company/your wonderful opportunity into a handful of carefully chosen words - you can give a long description without paying any extra. However, this doesn't necessarily make it easier. Having only a few words or paying a tenner for each can focus the mind wonderfully, and to the question of 'What?'to include you can now add the question of 'How Much?'

Writing copy for job ads is not easy in any case, as recruitment consultants will tell you [see ‘I hate my job’ on page 4 of this issue]. Although the latter have a great deal of practice it’s possible to feel a little stale after writing your twentieth ad of the week, and it’s also quite difficult to make each one sound sufficiently different, especially if clients don’t give their recruitment consultants enough insight into the role, or the nature of the company.

It’s clear, then, that ads which are prepared to give a bit more real information will get a better response. So which information is important to jobseekers, and is it possible to give it to them without revealing your true identity?

The following comments are based on feedback specifically sought from candidates over the past month, plus a steady stream of feedback over four years of running the site. The first thing to say is that expectations differ and it is impossible to appeal to all candidates. By no means all of them agree with the person quoted above:

• some expect to see a lot of info in the ad, and complain if it’s not there
• others assume that the ad is just supposed to filter out inappropriate people and that the ‘colour’ will follow later, ie when they ring up the advertiser or during the interview itself.

Candidates are prepared to do varying amounts of work as part of their search, but do not assume that the first of the above attitudes reflects laziness or not taking the job search seriously. Some of the best candidates are fussy about the lengths they’ll go to. Factors like location and seniority play a part - if you are looking for an AD role in Scotland or a Junior Research Exec position in the west country you are not, sadly, going to find a great number of suitable ads on MrWeb or anywhere else, so you can afford more time looking at each relevant ad that does appear. If you are looking for an RE or SRE role in London, it matters a great deal more that each ad is succinct and informative. You can’t ring them all!

Stating Salary / Salary Range

To help candidates, advertisers should quickly list the essential information, and our ad layout is designed to do this by putting title, location and salary in the link and at the top of each detail page. Some advertisers are reluctant to put salary not due to worries about their own staff but for reasons such as ‘not wanting to put people off ... if they’re really right for the job they can have more’. This is a bizarre way of proceeding, as 99% of candidates would like at least a guideline as to the salary attached to each job. The response to jobs giving a salary or salary range is much better than to ads not doing so.

Part of the reason for this is that there is such a diversity of attitudes as to what constitutes reasonable remuneration for certain levels of employee. Is a salary in the 20’s ever OK for an AD? Or should it be in the 40’s? And how come we have ads for ‘Project Managers’ with salaries less than £20,000 and others with salaries approaching £40,000? Clearly, they are not the same job and require candidates with vastly different experience - but never assume that your own concept of a job title will automatically pin down the level of person sought in the mind of a candidate.

We have tried hard over the last 4 years to get more and more jobs to give at least a salary range - we have had some success and now there are a relatively small minority that don’t list them. On a site with lots of jobs that do give salaries, the lack of one is more glaring. In the words of one candidate looking for clientside jobs at a reasonably senior level:

With the above basic info taken as read, and appearing in all ads, what really marks out the good from the bad ads is:

1. how quickly the ad lists the other important factual information, and
2. whether it also gives a reasonable feel for what makes the position and the company different.

Factual Info to Include

Taking 1 first, the factual information includes such things as whether the job is client or agency side - for some even more important than salary or location, and generally apparent from the title of ads or the first few lines but occasionally irritatingly unclear. It also includes information about the sectors researched or the types of technique used. Remember that most research execs have sub-specialisms within research - whether it’s sector, methodology, target audience (eg medical, b2b, consumer... ) or some other differentiator. If a role is focusing on one such area, or is in a specialist department, division or function within a company, it’s likely that this will get a mention in the first two lines anyway - make sure it does. But conversely if you have a role for an RE or SRE with a very broad remit covering many specialisms, you may have to pick out a few so as to avoid sounding boring or like a bad career move - ironically, as these may be among the more interesting jobs. Ads that sound very generic do suffer - illustrated by the following comment, which represents one extreme of opinion but finds an echo in other comments:

Again, having so many vacancies in this small sector collected in one place only underlines the shortcomings of such ads, as there will be others close by that read almost exactly the same.

Differentiating your Company

Now turning to point 2 above, note use of the word ‘different’ rather than ‘unique’ - you may believe that your offering is completely without parallel but candidates are a sceptical bunch and words like ‘unique’ have been known to put them off. Thinking in this way may also prove tortuous when you come to choosing your wording. Accept that a lot of jobs / companies cannot be made to sound unique in the space of a few paragraphs, but that equally they can be differentiated from the mass of ads, and that candidates will generally apply for a few at least so conveying uniqueness is not vital at this stage.

Candidates want to read what it’s like to work for you, not 'that it’s good'. ‘We are a great company and we want a wonderful person’ is completely unhelpful - ads that hype up job and company, unless obviously tongue-in-cheek, can wind jobseekers up as well. Contrasts between different corporate styles are more helpful - for example:

• ‘We are a hard-working company that pays well and we don’t want a slacker’
• ‘We believe you should work to live, not live to work’.

(The latter was recently used by an advertiser, and the former is paraphrased but certainly applies to a lot of agencies we know... ).

These are contrasting styles - each sounds good to a different sort of candidate, but neither is doing down the company - each tells the candidate something about your philosophy in a more credible way than just saying for example that the job is ‘superb’, a word mentioned by several candidates as a bit overused.

As a useful tool, ask yourself not ‘what makes us different to other companies?’, but ‘what makes us different to other 'good' companies?’ There is not much point in saying you are ‘one of the best to work for’ (unless supported by a recent survey!) as this will differ from person to person. Some candidates like companies to be ‘informal’ or ‘friendly’, others to be ‘cutting edge’ or ‘highly professional’ - both are positives but choosing such phrases differentiates you and hopefully attracts people who will fit in.

It could be argued therefore that your first priority is to give information and your second to ‘sell’ the job, but it’s only natural to want to do the latter. You might be thinking that if yours is the only ad that doesn’t say ‘superb’ candidates may wonder what’s wrong with it. It’s like an estate agent’s description that says ‘quite a nice house’ in that one automatically assumes it’s derelict. But if the factual part of the ad fits and candidates like the style of the other, they’ll go for it. Humour and honesty can sell too: a recent advertiser who promoted his location as ‘London’s fashionable Shoreditch’ told us ‘If they don’t realise it’s a joke, we don’t want them’ - the ad got a good response.

Content requirements vary according to the seniority of the appointment. At the most junior levels, more play is bound to be given to qualities and character attributes, whereas for senior positions, evidence of achievements is more plentiful.

Even ‘though a senior role may require all the more in the way of personal skills, senior candidates may be put off by the use of what they see as ‘vague’ language - ‘terms that add nothing’ as one put it, ‘eg good communication skills, presentable, team player ... ’

How Much to Write?

The question of how much to write is therefore, perhaps, less important than getting the right sort of content in. If you are writing quite a long description, it’s good to give it some structure, and bullet points are quite popular, with these comments from a current jobseeker echoing a number over the past couple of years:

Regular advertisers - the recruitment consultancies - obviously get a good feel for what works and what doesn’t, and some of their ads stick to a summary of 5 or 6 lines while others give 2 sets of bullet points and up to four or five paragraphs. Shorter ads on MrWeb do not on the whole get a poor response: some candidates will be less keen but we have in the past told consultancies to keep things relatively short, sometimes after receiving complaints from jobseekers that ads are too long! If the content is right, five lines can be enough for many viewers: if it isn’t, a whole page of description can’t make up for it.