Writing Without Waffle
Where are recruiters going wrong?
As you may know, I spend a lot of time travelling up and down the country with Mitch Sullivan, training recruiters how to write better job ads. As I’m a generalist copywriter, you might be wondering what I can teach them, and whether the lessons are applicable to you too.
Quite naturally, recruiters often think the way to write ads is the way that every other recruiter writes them. However, if you want to stand out, you need to be different.
Innocent Drinks is often held up as a paragon of virtue when it comes to tone of voice in their copy. The copy is ‘on brand’ on their website, newsletter, blog, packaging and even their vans. Yet, surprisingly, their job ads read much the same as everyone else’s.
Like many companies, their careers page shows the first few lines as a teaser with a ‘read more’ link to the rest of the ad. The trouble is that most of the opening teasers are top-down – written from the company’s point of view, not the reader’s:
- “We’re going through an exciting period of growth…”
- “To help us achieve this we’re looking for…”
- “We’re passionate about…”
- “We’ve come a long way from selling smoothies in West London in 1999…”
- “2017 was a great year for us, there was [sic] loads of great new products, we expanded into new regions and the business grew really well..”
The opening of any ad is the most important bit, as it determines whether or not people will read on. Not only does the Innocent approach fail to differentiate one job from another at a glance, but the copy fails the ‘who cares’ test, as it’s all about the company, not what’s in it for the reader.
Having assessed hundreds of ads, I notice that in-house and agency recruiters tend to repeat the same mistakes. And they don’t just apply to job ads.
Here are some of the most common copy mistakes so you can avoid them: