21 MAY 2015

The Best Way To Write & Create An Online Job Advert

Over the years, as you can imagine, we have worked on a vast amount of Further Education job adverts.

Over the years, as you can imagine, we have worked on a vast amount of Further Education job adverts. Sometimes we write them for our clients, or more often generally advise and tweak them along the way to improve performance.

THE GOLDEN RULES

The key thing to remember is WHAT you are writing – it is a job ADVERT, rather than a job DESCRIPTION. Think TV & press adverts, they are designed to grab your attention and make you want to find out more. 

So this week we are sharing our golden rules, top tips and advice so you can get the most mileage out of your College’s online job adverts. We kicked this off with a fantastic guest article by Paul Simpson, Head of HR at Rotherham College. In it he explained what makes job descriptions so important, where most companies were going wrong with theirs, and gave some great advice on the best ways to remedy this. You can read his article here.

Today we are telling you the rest of the story, and those that sign up to the blog in the next month will receive our handy FE job advert writing checklist to help you whizz through the fundamentals in no time.

RIGHT – ONTO THE HOW TO – HERE’S WHAT EVERY FE JOB ADVERT NEEDS

 1. A clear job title & salary

You’ll need to kick things off with a clear job title. This means keep it snappy yet descriptive. Try to use the most simple and obvious title. Many roles in Colleges have long and unnecessary titles that have been historically passed down from job description to job description, for example...

Site Standards and Maintenance Team Leader = Estates Manger / Facilities Manager

Casual Senior Trainer Consultant Refrigeration = Senior Trainer in Refrigeration (Casual hours)

Bear in mind that some abbreviations used in College are not always understood by non FE Sector candidates.

 2. Prioritise the big stuff

Nearly all candidates search under:

Job title

Location

Salary band

These need to be at the top of the advert so they are easily picked up in job board searches.

3. The job is?

Next, focus on crafting the brief section of copy that serves to advertise the job. This shouldn’t be too detailed or descriptive, but should act as a ‘hook’ to the reader that makes them click the ad for more details. Between 2 and 4 sentences will do the trick.

4. We need you to have..

Now we’re onto the main body of the advert, kicking off with the experience and qualifications section. As Paul noted in his article, it is important not to include anything more than necessary here, as there are some fantastic candidates out there who may not have travelled the conventional path. Obviously you will need to enter any must-have qualifications and experience.

5. A World full of opportunities

Next we have career opportunities and benefits. As Paul mentioned, it is so important to be truthful to the candidates here, making both the challenges and potential of the role plainly obvious if you want to generate the best applicants. The challenges that would put one candidate off may be exactly what another is looking for, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on having that active team member there with you to push your College forward to it’s full potential, because you're worried no one wouldn’t like the sound of it. This is your chance to inspire the candidates with the potential of the role, so they can really see what they could bring to your College.

6. So what’s in for me?

And now for the one we most often see missed out or poorly represented – the benefits.

Roles in the Further Education sector usually come with many benefits not found elsewhere, which many job hunters are not even aware of. These can often serve as the dangling carrot and prove difficult to resist! FE roles generally have a whole host of perks, such as better holiday allowance than the commercial sector, pension, childcare vouchers, cycle to work schemes, subsidised staff canteens, gym membership, hair and beauty services, to name a few. On top of all these is on-going training and support for candidates, which is a valuable addition to the package, as well as way to retain and grow your own staff.

Just imagine the financial benefit you can attach to all these and you will realise you need to sing about them from the roof tops! Missing these out is a schoolboy error that can leave you short on talent.

7. Close date

Always add the close date to the advert, which focuses the candidate to a deadline of when their application must be submitted. It also means you don’t have old adverts left on job boards.

8. Be disability friendly

To be truly positive about disability you need to make sure disabled candidates are not prohibited from applying for the role in any way. This can be through providing information on the vacancy in larger font, and being flexible about how you accept applicants. If you adhere to the Disability Employment Advisor's standards, set out here, and are given permission, you can use the two ticks symbol when advertising your roles to demonstrate you encourage applications from disabled people.

Which of our suggestions do you find it easy to forget? Make sure you have them to hand when you next write an FE job advert by signing up to our 'Best of the blog' monthly email as we are sending our job advert writing checklist to every sign up in the next month! 

Already signed up and still want the checklist? Pop me an email at claudia@www.onlyfe.co.uk and I'll be happy to send it over.