One of the asks in our recent job-seeker survey was tips for employers about how to make the most of their Job Finder listing. In the blog below, our Member Services Manager, Laura Elliot shares her top tips.
With the jobs market still proving tricky for some employers, making your advert stand out could make all the difference in finding the right candidate, so using feedback from the survey we’ve pulled together some tips to share what job-seekers want from your advert.
Keep it brief
Job adverts and applications need to cover a lot of things, but your advert is the first chance someone has to find out about your role and organisation. How do you catch their attention? Why would an applicant choose your role?
Evidence from major recruitment boards suggests keeping things brief – the most effective adverts are around 500 words, with anything under 500 words increasing application numbers.
Structure your advert to prioritise the information job-seekers care about most. Our adverts pull out key information like salary, hour and location in a summary section, so there’s no need to repeat those.
Almost 60% of users access our website on a mobile device, so they’ll see the key information from your advert, plus the first line of content. How are you opening your advert? How could you encourage people to read on?
Offer flexibility if you can
While it won’t be possible for every role, it’s worth asking yourself if you can offer candidates flexibility. Offering a flexible location or hours opens up your job to candidates who might not be able to commit to full time hours or working from a fixed base.
If you can offer these options, make sure you choose them in our job listing form as these feed directly into filters job-seekers use to narrow their job search.
Sell your benefits
It’s not just salary that attracts the best candidates, according to CharityJob’s recent report, benefits matter to employees too, so make sure you share them.
The most popular were 25+ days annual leave, flexible working hours, remote working options and training and development opportunities. You might offer some of these already, so make sure they’re obvious in your advert.
These benefits are also relatively low cost. For example, even if your organisation doesn’t offer training and development opportunities, our sector has lots of free resources you could use. Our events pages are a great starting point.
Share your advert further
When you list your advert on Job Finder, it’s shared on our website, included in our weekly jobs bulletin and posted on our dedicated twitter account, so we’ve got job-seeker’s favourite sources of job adverts covered.
But could you share it further? Think about where prospective candidates might be. Is your organisation active in particular networks? Are you active on other social media platforms? If so, why not share your Job Finder advert link there?
As an example, at VONNE, we’ve got good engagement on LinkedIn, so when we have vacancies, we share our Job Finder listing there. Our staff team help by sharing posts which is one of a number of ways you can help make your role visible.
Want more support?
Our Recruitment Support Service offers bespoke support for all aspects of the recruitment cycle. Get in touch to find out how we can help.
Our Membership+ packages include free access to a regular salary review report, which uses data and insights from our Job Finder service. For more detail, our Salary Benchmarking service gives role-specific analysis and recommendations. Bronze Membership+ is free for organisations with income under £50K.