Candidate attraction now largely means job boards. There must be eleventy squillion postings on the UK boards alone. (Citation needed.) So why can't I find one that's properly written?
Last week I was looking at totaljobs - which isn't a particularly bad example, they're all much of a muchness - and browsing through the postings of a globally-recognised London retailer. Every single one read badly. There are few spelling errors as such, but plenty of mistakes that simply shouldn't be there, particularly for such an illustrious brand.
What mistakes? Hmm. Question marks bang in the middle of sentences. No spacing between sentences. No understanding of where hyphens should go. Clumsy repetition. Run-on sentences (in a posting for a Copywriter). Clumsy repetition. The same job title capitalised differently in consecutive posts. Errant capitalisation generally. Cut-and-paste laziness (which means some, but not all, postings begin with 'Job Description'). One opening paragraph which is - amazingly - 210 words long. (I counted them.)
I understand that the person writing these postings is not a dedicated copywriter. I'm sure they're a brilliant HR admin, recruitment manager or RPO consultant. And many of these errors might be down to posting systems. But things must be improved. It's not just a question of aesthetics. It's a question of your message being sufficiently compelling to lure, and secure, your ideal candidate.
Ways to improve the situation, if you're an employer:
- Get a writer (agency or in-house) to edit your copy if it's not your strong suit.
- Write to a firm template.
- Use more bullet points. (Less room to make grammatical errors.)
- Arrange for an expert to create a 'Style Guide'.
More laterally, I wonder what copy-polishing services are offered by the job boards themselves? Volume may prohibit it in some cases, but it could prove to be a USP in an increasingly tight market.
Years ago, when we poor agency copywriters wrote 38 ads a day for the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph print recruitment sections, we had something called the 5 Paragraph Structure that would keep us on the straight and narrow if we were tired, bored, hungover or just generally incompetent. I'll dust it off and adopt it for the current era in a future post. (Particularly because I've just googled guides to writing job postings, and they're all crap.)
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