How can I make our grad recruitment ads more readable?

We were recently contacted by a grad employer asking, “This is my first foray into recruiting for interns so I am a little gun shy about placing our ad!  Any feedback would be appreciated.”

I was only too happy to help.

To clarify I am a marketing specialist with over 20 years experience in B2B business writing, not a HR practitioner, so my tips come from a marketer’s base:

• Invest some serious thinking time on your headline. More and more headlines are action-oriented and compelling to grab the attention of the 2 million students and grads who will potentially see it.
• Same for sub-headings, but not as much energy required – don’t just state a topic, keep the theme of having a call to action.
• Move the info about your organisation to the bottom of the ad. We all are lazy and have short concentration spans so good luck if you get someone to read everything the first time they see it. Much like a media release, put the important info at the top, followed by the nice-to-read content.
• Talk to your reader by using more ‘you’ and less of ‘the successful applicant’ – this helps make a connection (more of a marketing opinion as opposed to a HR one).
• Consider adding URLs to websites / web pages where candidates can find out more and get excited about applying. Because CareerHub’s presentation on uni job boards is purely as text without images, this is the next best thing.

Hope that helps. At the end of the day, you can only test and, whilst some of the above suggestions may help, you can never account for how candidates will or will not respond.

Good luck! As always, give us a call if you need some direction.

Wendy, CareerHub Central Employer Support 1300 852 112