How do you write a job advert that works?

Three things, and in most job adverts they appear in exactly the reverse order.

What will I be doing on a normal Tuesday. Not the job description in policy language, but the work itself: where you stand, who you work with, what comes in and what you deliver. A candidate can only picture themselves somewhere once they can picture a day. Put that paragraph at the top, directly under the title, and keep it concrete enough that a colleague already doing the job would recognise it.

What it pays and what it asks. Salary or range, working hours, location, the type of contract. This is the information everyone scrolls to first and that in many texts sits right at the bottom, behind the company description. Anyone who cannot find it does not go looking. They close the tab.

Why you. Not in superlatives, but in something verifiable: what is different about working here compared with the company down the road. If you cannot say that in two sentences, there is a question underneath that is bigger than the job advert. That is what employer branding is about.

The order matters more than the wording. A text that is beautifully written but arranged the wrong way round loses the reader before they reach the good part.

Three things that get in the way almost every time.

The requirements list nobody meets. A row of twelve bullets, half of them marked as desirable, reads as a barrier. Someone who meets nine out of twelve hesitates, and the people who withdraw fastest are precisely the people least willing to take a risk. Write down what someone genuinely has to be able to do on day one, and move the rest under what you are going to teach them.

The company description that is about the company. Year of founding, number of sites, core values, ambitions for the coming years. That paragraph is about you and not about the work, and it usually sits at the top as well. Cut it, or turn it into something that reaches the candidate: who are the people in the team they would be joining.

The job title that makes sense internally and is searched for nowhere. This is the quiet cost. "Operational Support Officer, Cluster North" exists in your job architecture and in nobody's head. Candidates search on the title that is normal in their trade, and advertising systems key on those same words. Find out what people in that field actually search for and put that term in the title, with your internal label underneath. In our own search research we see internal titles and searched titles drift apart again and again, and the vacancy then never gets found. What else you can do about visibility is on job marketing.

One more thing you can drop: the string of adjectives most texts open with. Dynamic, informal, no-nonsense and driven appear in so many job adverts that they cost you the first lines without distinguishing anything.

By measuring instead of guessing, and by asking the right question.

Change one thing at a time. If you adjust the title, rewrite the opening paragraph and add the salary in the same week, you will not know afterwards which of them did the work. Swap one element per campaign round and leave the rest alone. That takes longer, and it produces knowledge you can reuse on the next vacancy. Across more than 350 recruitment campaigns, 660 ad sets and 2,800 creatives, that discipline is the difference between a library of what works and a pile of anecdotes.

Look at who responds, not at how many respond. This is the most important reversal in the whole piece. More applicants is not a result if they are the wrong ones: it creates work for your recruiters, disappointment for the candidates and, in the end, the same open vacancy. So do not count responses, count the responses you invite, and watch whether that share goes up. That way you get more out of the same channel.

Look at where people stop as well. A text that reads well and that nobody responds to often has a problem further along: an application form that is too long, or a reply that comes too late. A text that produces plenty of responses of which none can go forward has a problem in the text itself. Recognise the first, look at too few applicants; the second, at wrong applicants.

Give a change time. A week is not a measurement, certainly not for roles with few candidates in the market. How we go about that is set out under data and optimisation, and how we make the texts and images themselves under recruitment content.

How long should a job advert be?

As long as it takes to explain the job and not a sentence longer. Length is not the problem, order is the problem. A long text that starts with the work and the salary reads more easily than a short text that starts with the core values. So cut rather than shorten: take out what is about you and leave in what is about the work.

Does the job title really matter that much?

More than almost anything else in the text, because it decides whether the advert is found at all. Candidates search on the term that is usual in their trade, and advertising platforms match on those same words. An internal title takes the vacancy out of that search before a single word of your text has been read.

Can we reuse the same job advert for several roles?

The structure yes, the content no. The framework used here, first the work, then what it pays, then why you, fits almost any role. The concrete content does not: an engineer and a project manager read for different things and search on different words. A template you fill in everywhere produces texts that are slightly wrong everywhere.

We rewrote everything and still get no applications. What now?

Then the problem is probably not in the text. A vacancy nobody sees does not improve with better sentences: that is a question about channels and reach. A vacancy that is seen a great deal and that nobody responds to is about the text or the offer. Work out which of the two it is before rewriting again.

We write job adverts and run them in campaigns, so we see week by week what a changed sentence does to the inflow. At SocialFind we are happy to look at the texts you currently have open. If you would like articles like this in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.