Writing recruitment advertising for your local newspaper was traditionally the form of advertising the majority of companies adopted in the initial stages of the recruitment drive. You may think it is an easily transferable process when doing so for an online audience, however traditional press advertisements don’t usually rely on the right structure and keywords quite like online advertisements do. This is purely down to the wider audience you have to appeal towards online, the increased competitiveness required in order to separate you from the rest and the fact that your job has to be found.

Traditional press advertisements were the norm a number of years ago and the most popular form for recruiting. However, with all aspects of business turning towards the digital era, candidates are pushing more towards web searches and online job boards and tend to use keywords which relate to their job searches online rather than the full job title or the skills that they possess. Ensuring the availability of the search results from a job board search engine are easily accessible, they are typically listed in order of relevance, determined by the date the advertisement was posted on the site, the search terms or ‘keywords’ included in the job title and how often the search terms are used in the advert text.

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Here are Webrecruit Ireland’s top tips on how to transform your recruitment advertising online:

1. Avoid Jargon to increase understanding

When you are writing online recruitment advertising, it does no harm in doing some competitive research to see the search terms rival organisations are using for their job vacancies. This will help you determine the appropriate search terms that your desired candidates would actually use, rather than what the ears and eyes of the employees within the company want to use internally.

The same principle applies to the stated job title. The post holder may be the Analyst Leader-New Business within your company, but the term ‘Business Analyst’ is much more likely to feature at the top of search results. Bear in mind that the keywords in job titles can be ‘weighted’, meaning that they have greater ‘worth’ than the same term used in the main body of your advert. Always make it easy to be found.

2. Optimise, optimise, optimise

Enhancing the search results you receive comes down to the text you use for your recruitment advertising and writing it in a way that naturally incorporates keywords. This should be used throughout and as often as possible. Instead of “you will be working…”, for example, you may state “As an SEO copywriter, you will be working…”

3. Keep it short & give them a reason to apply

To communicate the message to the potential candidate, like press advertisements, online advertisements generally need to be short and straight to the point but for different reasons. Whereas press advertising has limited space on a page, forcing a word/character limit, this isn’t the case online as word limit isn’t normally an issue, although reader’s attention spans are shorter on the Internet.

You can have that apprentice winning recruitment advertisement but candidates still need to get up and apply and ensuring you have written precise information that leaves the candidate in no doubt about what the job entails. It also important if you want to attract the right applications, that you make clear the required skills and experience for the role, to minimise the number of irrelevant applications. While a specific salary band will also attract more applications than an indistinct phrase like ‘competitive’, especially due to the economic climate when many passive candidates are reluctant to change roles.

4. Sell the Company

Finally, use your recruitment advertising to illustrate what kind of company you are, highlighting achievements and recent developments as well as location.

The New Newspaper Recruitment is Online

Overall, writing online advertisements is all about targeting your audience and making sure they can easily find you then understand what you’re offering. Happy writing! The benefits of online recruitment advertising speak for themselves.