Vacancies to fill? Here’s how to make your job ads pop

Resilience
Written By Laura Linham

With UK vacancies continuing to rise and the skills gap growing at a concerning rate, perhaps it’s not all that surprising that huge numbers of vacancies are going unfilled.

With competition for top talent rife, employers could be falling at the first hurdle by failing to include details that are paramount for the modern-day worker.

“Skills shortages are still a great concern for recruiters and hiring teams across the UK,” says Rob Brodie, Head of Corporate Sales at JobAdder.

“The pandemic has certainly altered what candidates want when searching for a new job and it’s important that this is reflected in job ads if businesses hope to bypass the competition and secure top talent.

“Now more than ever, highlighting a salary range in your job ad is incredibly important for attracting your ideal candidate, yet there are still a significant number of ads failing to include this.

“Applicants need to know they aren’t wasting their time and excluding this critical information from a job ad will limit the success of a hiring campaign. The same goes for other crucial details that many job ads are still failing to include, such as the location and start date.”

“While the skills crisis we’re facing won’t be solved easily, addressing the basics can’t be forgotten, including the impact of powerful job ads.”

At a time when the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has reported record vacancy numbers since summer 2021, it’s getting harder and harder to make sure you’ve got the right people in your team.

Here’s what Brodie says you need to include in an advert to make sure you attract enough applicants:

Company culture:

The Covid19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the workforce, changing what people want from both a job and employer.

An increasing number of job seekers are prioritising culture when choosing a company to work for. To stay on top of these demands, it’s important for a job ad to highlight a firm’s ethics, mission and values.

Salary and perks:

Despite the pandemic changing the priorities of the workforce, salary remains a dealbreaker for candidates. Job adverts that don’t indicate at least a salary range will go ignored by a significant number of candidates. Showcasing the right perks is also going to be critical, but these need to be aligned with the wants of today’s workforce.

Transparency: With an abundance of roles available, job ads need to be direct and informative, shedding complete clarity on the position. At a base level, this must include location specifics, start dates and what skills/experience if required. If these are flexible, then job adverts should highlight this.

And it’s worth remembering…

Research carried out by recruitment site Reed.co.uk has found:

  • The most effective ads consist of around 500 words, with a job title length of just 29 characters - in fact, anything under 500 words will increase application numbers by an average of 12%.

  • A vacancy with a fixed salary receives 90% more applications than one with a hidden or negotiable salary

  • Adverts that use a postcode receive up to 10x more applications than those without.

  • Well-formatted job descriptions receive 7% more applications than their messier counterparts.

  • 45% of jobseekers prefer to be contacted via email – with other popular methods including phone and SMS.

In an increasingly fast moving world, your recruitment strategies also have to be fast moving so that you can attract the best quality applicants for your vacancies that are hard to fill.

For many of your recruitment strategies it could just be case of taking the ones you already have in place and tweaking them slightly so that they are brought right into line with what applicants might be looking for - and that applicants know that it’s the case.

Laura Linham