The ever-increasing importance of a good job advert

by in Online Advertising, Recruitment Marketing

The importance of a good job advert and the copy can be a topic on anybody’s agenda working within the recruitment sector; whether it’s a recruitment software company or an agency helping recruitment companies with their marketing. I believe it cannot be stressed enough how vital a grammatically correct and well-structured job description can be.

What can be continually talked about is how to make a job advert more compelling, better, stand-out. However, the importance of having a good advert has become increasingly known with the recent changes in the job advertising space. Job advert placement may be affected now by how good the job copy is, which may shift how recruiters start to look at their job adverts and how they write them. Here are some reasons why your job copy may impact how well it performs on job advertising platforms.

The changing recruitment climate

Over the last ten years, employment has had a steady increase with 2018 peaking at the highest yet. While this is great for the economy, we have noticed a trend with our WaveTrackR data with more job postings, and fewer applicants applying for job roles. That trend may be the knock-on effect of having a shortage of people to fill positions or even a skills shortage, especially with the eminence of Brexit. Whatever the reason may be, your job advert needs to be at its best to push through the other adverts.

The increasing importance of making your advert stand out and be correct, because of the changing recruitment climate, means you need to pay extra attention to what you are trying to convey to gain conversions from the candidates applying for your jobs.

Indeed

Advert quality is becoming increasingly more critical to the job board Indeed. It’s recent announcement proves just that, with Indeed informing people that as of January 7, 2019, jobs sent to Indeed sites in the US and Canada from recruitment-based companies will no longer be eligible. While this doesn’t affect the UK yet, they have taken it upon themselves to take the first steps in improving job seekers’ experience by reducing the number of poor adverts published on their sites. It’s just a shame that their Search Quality team have identified it to be recruitment-based companies being the culprits for low-quality adverts. Indeed made it very clear stating that ‘Only showing high-quality jobs remains a top priority’.

Indeed is one of the first significant job boards to focus on this issue, taking action on the problem. Nonetheless, will this have a knock-on effect with other job boards to follow suit? Advertising platforms may take on this model in some way to ensure good quality adverts, but who knows?

What I found interesting was when reading the new announcement from Indeed, it states that recruitment-based companies are still ‘eligible for promotion as sponsored jobs.’ Meaning the advert can still be displayed if it’s a paid promotion, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense because, in principle, you can still post a low-quality advert. However, when looking into this its because they are also looking at high rates of duplication, reposting and location blasting as well.

Google for Jobs

Google is still a vast platform and a new player in the recruitment industry. Whether people believe in this way of applying for jobs yet, is still to be revealed. However, from our analytics, we saw a 25% increase in organic traffic to our job board JobsTrackR, and all of that is thanks to Google for Jobs. However, there wasn’t a huge change in the number of applications (only 29% of those applying for jobs), as job adverts haven’t changed, including their copy.

Google for Jobs is honing in on the quality of job adverts, focusing on these three factors:

  1. Use a standard job title
    Standard job titles make a difference because Google records popular job titles that people use as a ‘Keyword’ in their search. It must also be referenced in the job description and not intentionally mislead people into considering the job because the title is inconsistent with the job description.
  2. Display an accurate salary
    What Google also looks for is an actual salary, which should be kept to an appropriate level because Google will compare salaries with similar jobs and penalise your positions if they see inflated values.
  3. State the exact location
    Location is highly essential for Google For Jobs because they want jobs to be searchable by location filters. That is why postcodes within job adverts are becoming increasingly vital to getting your job high on Google.

Job advert quality is just as important as ever, and with these examples taking motion currently. There may be many more actions that need to take place in the recruitment sector to improve the job seeker experience with job copy. After all, the job seeker is what makes the recruitment wheel go around.