Freelance copywriter specialising in recruitment communications
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What do your recruitment communications say about you?

26/3/2013

3 Comments

 
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The relentless advance of technology's great. Applicant tracking systems, more analytics than you can shake a stick at, the way we can effortlessly keep in touch with each other, and even make ‘friends’ out of strangers. The trouble is, it’s made the job posting process so simple that literally anyone can do it. Indeed, I’m sure, seeing so many awful job ads on a daily basis, that in some agencies a junior member of staff or someone working in a support role is entrusted to post the latest vacancies online.

The result? Dull and turgid job descriptions hastily cut and pasted by someone with no understanding of the client’s actual need. An advertisement that’s littered with spelling mistakes, including inexcusable errors like asking for “a good telephone manor” or stating right at the start of the ad that “our client are looking for…”. There are literally thousands of examples out there for all to see! The question is - why?

When it comes to advertising and marketing, whether it be a website, a TV or radio advertisement or the good old job post, people are driven, first and foremost, by their emotions. Just as you wouldn’t book a holiday at a hotel if the images made it look shabby and the write up was full of spelling mistakes, so good quality potential candidates won't give you more than a few seconds to grab their attention and interest them enough to read on. If all they come across is badly written or cut and pasted copy full of errors, the chances are they’ll soon move on to the next ad. Yes, you’ll still probably get inundated by irrelevant and poor applications and swear that it’s the medium you are using to advertise that’s at fault (“job boards are dying” etc.), but the reality is, if you don’t invest proper time, care and forethought in your communications, you’ll continue to get poor quality response, no matter what medium you use.

Put simply, every time you put a message out there, you're making a statement about your company. You're projecting an image. And, you're being judged - constantly.  Not just by potential candidates who are likely to think that if you can’t get the basics right, why should they trust you with their career aspirations. No, it’s far worse than that. I’m talking about potential clients too – and possibly existing ones as well, keen to find out what sort of service they are actually getting for their money.

That's why I suggest that, if you’re not doing it already, you make sure that whenever you’re thinking of advertising, updating your website or sending out an ‘e-mailer’, you take the time to get the message right. Spelling mistakes, bad grammar, typos, and the lack of a cohesive, powerful or convincing message - all of these factors can make the difference between success and failure. I appreciate that some people are just not comfortable writing a job ad. Indeed, I’ve met lots of consultants who put off writing them to the very last minute or see it as so much of a chore that they hand the task over to someone else. But, at the end of the day, good quality candidates are your lifeblood – and they won’t respond to just any old advertisement. Cutting corners will only cut your success rate.

Your recruitment consultancy may well already recognise the importance of clear, consistent and alluring communications.  Or maybe you need to take the time do a quick audit and identify the people in your office who have a flair for writing the ads and entrust them to be the champions of your advertising and marketing communications. Either way, in an ever more competitive recruitment marketplace, it pays to remember that first impressions really do count – and there’s a whole online world out there watching. Write what you yourself would want to read.


3 Comments
Alastair Blair link
29/3/2013 05:20:03 am

Funnily enough, I was just discussing this with Alex Clyne before the link popped into my inbox. I know it's easy to sound like a grumpy old man (largely because I am....), but in my view one of the origins of the problem of quick and easy, cut and paste crap copy was the change from print to digital. It became too quick and too easy. Quality went out of the window. I do sense that with the increasing desire for more and better analysis of the whole business of recruitment marketing there will be a concomitant move towards using more creativity and better crafted copy, with adept usage of keywords to ensure that companies' recruitment is not only effective but seen to be effective. Given the declining importance of HR within many firms, this is very much in their interest!

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Alasdair Murray link
29/3/2013 06:04:13 am

Hi Alastair, and thanks for the comment. I'm a grumpy old man too, but having grown up recruitment advertising wise in the same era as your good self, i.e. when media decisions were measured and reasoned and the content of what appeared in the press had more than a little thought behind it, what we see before us today does irk me, to say the least.

This whole pile it high sell it cheap, as many job boards as you can shake a stick at for less than £100 mentality is farcical. Not only is it untargeted, a lot of the time the message within is deathly dull or littered with typos/basic grammatical errors. Many online job ads wouldn't have made it into the press, that's for sure. Job boards aren't dying, but many are doing their best to kill them off with there half-baked excuses for what we used to call a recruitment ad. And the sad thing is, so many fail to grasp that basic principle of the need for some kind of allure. Instead, creativity is being strangled by technology, with the concern being more about lowering the cost per hire and measuring the analytics rather than crafting an ad that actually appeals to its readers and placing that message in the right media. Those analytics will always reveal the results of the exercise to be crap if the message in the ad they are measuring is also crap. And so it goes on!

We've muddied the waters of recruitment by talk of job boards dying, print being a thing of the past - full stop, social media - Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin et al - being the thing, video ads and all manner of other 'options', when in fact recruitment can be quite simple if there is reasoning and targeting behind it. The trouble is, more and more, there doesn't appear to be. It's a scattergun, bread on the water approach on the basis that surely if we reach a billion people with our message the right person will come along for the job. No, they won't, and they never will as long as your message and the media you use is flawed.

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Megan Proctor link
1/7/2022 12:28:57 am

Grrateful for sharing this

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    About Me

    An experienced creative freelance copywriter and former recruitment advertising agency client services executive up to Director level, I have also worked in the advertising departments of national and regional newspapers and at a London Advertising Sales House. I set up my own copywriting business back in 2001 and work with a wide range of clients on a variety of press and online copywriting projects, the majority focused on recruitment communications. You can also find me on Twitter under my pseudonym '@RecruitmentCopy'

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