Reading — The Job Advert That Nobody Answers

Recruiting

The Job Advert That Nobody Answers

You wrote it in twenty minutes by copying last year’s. That is exactly the problem.

Adapted from Textio

Most job adverts are written the way most emails are written: quickly, from an old one, by someone who has ten other things to do. And then the applications do not arrive, and everybody blames the market. The market is rarely the problem. The wording usually is.

Textio, a company that analyses the language of millions of job posts, has built a simple framework for writing them better. They call it the five Cs: compelling, competencies, culture, current and clear. It is worth walking through, because each one corresponds to a mistake almost everyone makes.

Compelling: the tone you did not choose

Language carries signals we do not hear ourselves. Textio’s research found that job posts where a man was eventually hired used roughly twice as many masculine-toned phrases as feminine ones. Nobody wrote those adverts intending to filter by gender. The tone did it quietly, word by word: aggressive, rockstar, dominate the market. Read your advert aloud and ask who it sounds like it was written for.

Competencies: the list that closes the door

This is the expensive one. Underrepresented groups are far less likely to apply for a role when they do not meet every single requirement on the list. So each line you add — a degree, a number of years, a city — quietly removes people who could have done the job well. The discipline is brutal but simple: for every requirement, ask whether someone could do this job without it. If the answer is yes, it is not a must-have. Move it down, or delete it.

Notice what this does to the modal verbs you use. Candidates must have five years of experience is a wall. You should be comfortable working with data, and you don’t need a formal qualification to be is a door. Same role, very different applicant pool.

Culture, current, clear

The last three are quicker. Culture: say what you actually value and how you actually work, and write the benefits in a way that includes everyone — parental leave rather than maternity leave. Current: do not recycle an advert from three years ago; the language of work moves, and a stale post reads as a stale company. Clear: cut the jargon, the sports metaphors and the clichés. Textio’s data puts the sweet spot at roughly three hundred to six hundred and sixty words — long enough to be honest, short enough to be read.

None of this is about lowering the bar. A well-written advert is often harder on the things that matter, because it has stopped wasting space on the things that do not. It says exactly what the person will do in the first six months, exactly what they need to bring, and nothing else. The candidates who answer it are the ones who read it and thought: that is me.

And there is one more reason to take the time. Everyone who reads your advert forms an opinion about your company, whether they apply or not. It is the cheapest piece of employer branding you will ever write, and most companies write it in twenty minutes.