As with all businesses, building a brand as a recruitment agency should be multi-faceted and considered across any point of contact you have with your clients and candidates – but there might be one area you don’t view as a branding tool. Wave’s Emily Buckley looks at the ways your job adverts can be an incredibly effective way to build your brand.
How do you build a brand as a recruitment agency? Your website is a good vehicle for this, allowing you to add visual branding such as brand colours, logo and font, as well as setting the right tone and communicating your values. However, your website might not be the first thing candidates see. Many candidates will start off their job search by typing or tapping a job title, industry or role into a search engine and reading a job advert. If this is the case, it’s your job ad that will be forming your brand before anything else.
Also don’t forget that your job advert is the first thing you have put out there on behalf of your client that people will see. Both potential and current clients will read the job ads you post for other clients and form an opinion of your brand from that. A compelling, well written, well structured job ad can therefore be an incredibly effective way to build your brand and form positive brand associations in the minds of both candidates and clients.
What is a brand?
Branding goes beyond the visual elements we often associate with a particular brand. Logo, colours, a website – all are important but do not exclusively create a brand. At its heart, a brand is the way clients or customers respond to a company, the way they think or feel when they encounter a business or name. It is the values, approach and ethos that people associate with a particular company.
How can job ads help to build your brand?
Job advertising is the most measurable, most instant form of recruitment marketing and this is where branding comes into it. It is your first connection with many candidates and potential clients and therefore what you say, how you say it and the way you display it is crucial in making those initial impressions positive. It doesn’t matter that it is a job ad for a client – the way you communicate that job says a lot about the way you operate. This is why one of the most effective ways for a recruitment agency to build a brand is to be remembered for putting out good job ads.
Avoid the job description trap
Many recruiters rely heavily on the job description when constructing job adverts but cutting and pasting the JD into a job ad will not bring you the candidates you need or do anything to enhance your brand. It’s understandable why so many recruiters do it and there are a number of elements at play here. If they work for an agency, they might be trying to anonymise as much as possible. It could just be that they’re incredibly busy, or that they’ve been told to do it that way. However, a lengthy, dull job description is not a job advert. Adverts are designed to sell and that won’t be doing the job or your agency justice.
Has speed trumped quality?
In the days of press advertising, agencies would never publish what they do now on job boards. Ad space was incredibly expensive and your ads would go out maybe once a week. That meant you had the time to spend crafting the perfect job ad but also the expense of it meant that you had to get it right to ensure a reasonable ROI. As soon as the pace of recruitment changed with the advent of job boards, speed became the priority for recruiters and the quality changed. When job boards started to really take root in the 2000s, they rapidly became the de facto route to advertise jobs. Everyone had email, now everyone could find jobs quickly, react to them immediately and send their CV over instantly. For those first few years, speed and convenience trumped job ad quality and the climate changed so incrementally over 15 years that everyone just got used to it.
Job ad creation is a skill…
The risk is that writing the job ad becomes as much a function of admin as marketing which is a tragedy because crafting a job ad that will be found in searches, that resonates, that appeals, and that encourages candidates to find out more or to apply is a skill and deserves to have time spent on it. It is an investment in the job, in the business, and in the brand.
… but not necessarily a written skill
The great news is that you don’t need to be an amazing writer to be an effective copywriter. As recruitment copywriting expert Mitch Sullivan insists on Wave’s Talent Matters podcast, the common mistake recruiters make when writing their first job ad isn’t the quality of writing, it’s the structure of the content. There’s a logical way to structure content based on what the reader most wants to know. Role first, then location (or a specification that the role is remote), whether there is flexibility in terms of hours, remuneration package, necessary experience and skills (‘necessary’ is an important distinction here), key responsibilities, and ending on a high with any benefits. It should be easy for candidates to skim-read and yet still pull out what they need.
Ensure your job ads are inclusive
One way to actively tarnish your brand through your job ads is to pay no heed to D&I. This means optimising the words used in your job ads as well as adding a brief D&I statement. Whether used consciously or unconsciously, certain words can exclude huge swathes of the workforce. To help ensure that you aren’t deterring candidates from a gender, race or accessibility viewpoint, it is vital to comb through your wording. Remove gendered words and pronouns (e.g. ‘tenacious’ and ‘driven’), as well as gendered job titles (e.g. ‘waitress’ or ‘barman’) and derogatory gender words (e.g. ‘stallion’). You should also only include ‘must-haves’ rather than a long list of ‘nice to haves’ and make sure you remove all business jargon.
Job ads now often the first point of contact
As online recruitment became ubiquitous, agencies changed, with many becoming more niche and servicing wider geographical areas. At the same time, the law changed so that recruiters didn’t have to meet every candidate at interview. This sped up the process and made things more convenient for both candidate and recruiter but the risk now is that the connection between the two can be harder to form. Having to meet candidates created a greater warmth. Without that immediate connection, recruiters have to get better at writing as the job ad is often the first point of contact.
Humanise your job copy
Simply humanising your job ad copy, writing it for people to read, can go a long way to helping you to build your brand identity as an approachable, caring and considered recruitment agency. It involves writing an ad with the aim of connecting with someone, of evoking a response or an emotion. It also allows candidates to see your humanity, rather than a faceless, emotionless piece of copy that could have been generated by a computer. Create a candidate persona so that you can be targeted in your writing, inject personality (it is perfectly possible to show personality and still be professional), write in the second person narrative to avoid sounding too corporate and detached. Ultimately, you are writing on behalf of humans, for humans. Never forget that recruitment is, at its heart, all about people. This goes a long way to building positive brand associations.
The reality of job ad creation
If you’re a recruiter reading this and thinking that you don’t have time to even start thinking about how to improve your job ads, there are plenty of resources out there to help, from paid courses to free online resources and even guides from some of your tech suppliers. However, it’s important to remember that most of the time it’s logistically not feasible for any busy recruiter – whether in-house or agency – to produce a really good ad for every job they work on. What you can do is produce more effective ads for every job. That is something that can realistically be achieved and will have an extremely positive affect on your brand. Still worried about the extra time this will take? It all comes down to automating and using tech where possible. Take time over the creation of your job ads which needs human skill and save time on areas that can be automated, such as job posting with a multi-poster.
Everything you put out into the world, from your website, to LinkedIn posts, to your job ads, contribute to building your brand. If you want that brand to be strong, your job ads need to showcase your talents as a recruitment agency just as every other form of communication does.
Wave aims to create a world where talent is never missed by providing recruitment solutions through a mix of cutting-edge technology and creativity, via WaveTrackR (data-powered multi-poster and analytics tool), RecWebs (tailored recruitment websites) and WaveMedia (strategic recruitment media buying).
