Dr. Dave
Barnett
Ads Communicate Your Uniqueness
In addition to targeting your recruitment ad to the values and needs of your prime candidates, you should also come up with one or two things unique to you, your company, product, or work environment. These singularities help differentiate you from your competition. You will be further ahead in the long-term stating one or two unique key benefits about your work (flexible hours, casual dress code, location of your company) than to publicize a laundry list of trumped-up hyperbole ("unlimited income", "chance of a lifetime", "easiest job you'll ever have").
Publish the income range of the position as well as the pay program (commission, salary plus bonus, etc.).
The more realistic your income estimates, the more likely you will attract genuinely qualified candidates. You may attract some gullible folks by using overstated claims, and you may even "sell" some of them on signing up. But you're further ahead financially to telling the truth up-front rather than incurring the high costs of job turnover from the disillusioned and disaffected.
Action Line
Perhaps the most important part of your recruitment ad is your call to action. What is it you want prospective candidates to do? This should be spelled out clearly.
You have several basic action choices. What your ad asks candidates to do will have a lot to do with what kind of response you get. Your action line can work for you or against you.
If you want to maximize responses, publish a fax number or an e-mail address and ask for resumes, these calls to action require little initiative or commitment. Asking candidates to mail resumes ups the ante a little. Now the job seeker has to invest a postage stamp and a trip to the mailbox. Do not ask candidates to call unless you have voice mail. Not only is this a huge time and energy trap, but it could cost you in other ways if a good candidate reaches a busy signal while you're explaining your opportunity for the umpteenth time.
However, using the phone can be a highly effective way to secure candidates. One top recruiter in the mortgage loan business ends his recruiting ads for telesales candidates with an action line to call and leave a five-minute voicemail message.
"I introduce the company, describe the position and what we're looking for, and then ask them to tell me about themselves and why we might want to interview them," he explains. "Since the core competency of the job is using the phone, I learn a lot more from their voice mail messages than I do from a resume. Besides, the people who aren't comfortable on the phone never even bother to call. That saves me a lot of time and wasted effort."
Here's an important to principle to remember: your call to action should be directly related to the skills and initiative required by the job. The more commitment required to respond to your ad will likely lower the number of responses you get, but the candidates who do respond will be of better quality.
The action line requiring the highest level of commitment is requiring job candidates to show up in person. Not only does this effectively weed out those with little initiative, it also says right up front that initiating contact is the most important skill required for success in this position.
While everybody wants to see a good response from his or her advertising investment, I don't consider this blizzard of creative writing the best measure of an ad's success. In fact, the less your job requires writing and organizational skills, the less you should rely on the written resume.
Asking sales candidates to send resumes is a low energy, low commitment response. It invites many of the merely curious to distract you from finding qualified candidates with more drive and initiative. You're not hiring a librarian. Use the hiring process to filter out the unmotivated and non-serious candidates.
Conclusion
The well-written recruitment ad communicates not only the nature of the job, but also tells candidates about your values. Recruitment ads should be designed and written to target the needs of complementary selling styles. Honest ads can help minimize costly turnover. Your ad's action line can and should filter out the unmotivated by requiring a response critical to job performance.
