In this current employment market, when candidates are hard to come by, job ads need to be even more appealing to achieve their goals.

Whilst the effectiveness of job boards has decreased, they are still a popular and effective place to recruit talent if done well. However, the days of posting your ad on job boards and expecting masses of applications from quality candidates are gone.

If you haven’t had much success with job ads, it may be that they are missing key elements that candidates are looking for. Here are the most common reasons candidates are skipping your job ad and looking at the competition.

• It’s boring!
  If your job ad is full of jargon, merely states the facts and offers no insights into your organisation's culture, then it will be hard for a candidate to imagine themselves working there. Add a bit of personality by describing the type of person you are looking for, skip the jargon and try some conversational language to make it more interesting.
  
  
• It talks about you and not them
  When reading a job ad, candidates want to know what benefits are on offer so they can directly compare it with their current situation. Is this a prospect worth taking the trouble to change jobs for? Does the job offer the option to work from home, flexible hours, professional development, additional annual leave or bonuses? Put yourselves in the shoes of a job seeker. If the job ad describes a lot about the company but includes nothing about the benefits of the role, then job seekers may give it a miss.
  
  
• Your list of requirements is longer than ‘War and Peace’
  If you’re looking for a self-starter that is a great multi-tasker and can handle a heavy workload with 25 years of experience, that can hit the ground running, is results orientated, with leadership ability, then...you’ve lost most job seekers before they’ve finished reading this sentence. Stipulating a very long list of requirements will make your expectations seem unreasonable.
  
  
• No Indication of seniority
  If there is no mention of the seniority level of the role, candidates can't understand if the role would be a challenge, a step up, a step-down or the same level. In addition to this, a salary level can be a good indication of a role’s seniority. So, if this is also missing, then you run the risk of many candidates ignoring the ad.
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Applications per job ad have steadily dropped in the past 2 years, falling 47% in March 2022 compared to March 2019. Smart employers who add a bit of life to their job ads will attract more relevant candidates.