Job advert: writing one that attracts the right applicants

A job advert does two jobs that pull in opposite directions: it has to attract people who would be good at the role and discourage people who would not. Most adverts do neither, because they are written by pasting the internal job description into a template — and a job description describes a role to somebody who already has it, while an advert has to persuade a stranger that it is worth an hour of their evening.

What a job advert has to contain

• The salary, or a genuine range. Omitting it reduces applications from exactly the candidates who have options.
• What the person will actually do in the first six months, in concrete terms rather than responsibilities.
• Who they work with and who they report to, since that shapes the job more than the title does.
• Location and working pattern stated plainly — hybrid means nothing without the number of days.
• The three or four things that are genuinely required, separated from what is merely desirable.
• How to apply and what happens next, with a realistic timescale.

What quietly deters good candidates

Long lists of requirements, mostly. Evidence consistently shows that people apply when they meet nearly everything and self-select out otherwise, and the effect is uneven — it filters out capable candidates from under-represented groups more than it filters out unsuitable ones. The other reliable deterrents are a missing salary, an application process asking for a full history before anybody has read a CV, and language that sounds like a company talking to itself: synergies, rockstars, fast-paced environment. The last of those is widely read as a warning rather than a description.

Write the advert before the job description rather than after. Describing the role to a stranger forces clarity about what it is actually for, and the arguments that surface at that stage are much cheaper than the ones that surface after a hire.

Making it findable

1. Use the job title people search for rather than the internal one — nobody searches for «customer happiness ninja».
2. Put the location in the title where the role is site-based, since that is how people filter.
3. Keep the first two lines strong, because that is all that shows in most listings and search results.
4. Publish it on your own site as well as job boards, so it can be linked and found directly.
5. State the closing date, or say that applications are reviewed as they arrive, which is kinder and usually true.

Ettex Web is a reasonable home for the advert itself, so the canonical version lives on a page you control and every board links back to it. The structured version — duties, requirements, reporting line — belongs in the job description, which is a different document for a different reader.