There’s a cold hard truth in recruitment: job advertisements are boring. In the sea of bland and beige job descriptions masquerading as job ads, it’s no wonder that great candidates are disengaging before they’ve even read the second sentence
Job ads are just like any other form of advertising. When they’re done well, they entice and engage your target audience (your ideal candidates), so they can do something you want them to do (apply for a role with your company). Yet employers often overlook this simple fact.
In today’s labour market, job ads are ruthless filters. Companies are judged by what their job ads say, what they don’t, and how they say it. If you’re trying to hire A-grade candidates with mediocre job ads, you’re fishing with supermarket bait and wondering why you’re not catching the big fish.
Think of the typical structure of a job ad you see almost everywhere, including LinkedIn, job boards and company career pages. Most look like this:
- About Us
- Role overview
- Responsibilities
- Send your CV here
When your job ads resemble a template with no real insight into the culture, this is what your candidates are seeing: “We wrote this on autopilot and we’re hoping for the best.”
Candidates can tell when you copy-pasted a job description into an AI tool. They know when you’re just ticking HR boxes, but haven’t thought about what gets your employees out of bed in the morning. And that’s what you should be leading job ads with.
Job ads are marketing, not admin
When I was a branch manager for an international recruitment agency, I learned this fast: If you want standout people, you have to stand out first as an employer. In the ads we wrote on behalf of clients, we made sure candidates could clearly see themselves in the role before we started describing the business.
That meant being deliberate about what we led with in job ads. Instead of using generic text and a long-winded “About us” paragraph, we were upfront about the way the role actually operated. We showed candidates the level of autonomy, the quality of the work, the decision-making authority, and what success would look like in their first year. No gimmicks or grandstanding were necessary.
That single change did more filtering than any list of selection criteria ever could. The excellent quality of candidates we reeled in proved it worked. It’s entirely possible to write a job ad that isn’t boring, but also gets the nod from HR and legal teams.
What candidates are looking for
Experienced candidates already know the basics about the role. They’re looking for signals about leadership maturity. They want to know whether the environment will actually support and reward their high performance, instead of just demanding it.
This is where many job ads unintentionally work against employers. In an effort to be safe or compliant, they strip out the information that senior candidates use to assess their fit within the team. What’s left in the job ad might be technically correct, but lacks the emotional hook that convinces good candidates to apply.
Strong candidates aren’t looking to be “given an opportunity.” They are deciding whether a role is worth investing their time and energy in. They want to understand how their performance is recognised, and whether the environment will allow them to do their best work.
If you’re struggling to attract excellence, the issue is rarely about candidate motivation or availability. More often, it’s what your job ads are signalling. Your job ad is the front door. Right now, many organisations are unintentionally screening out the very people they’re trying to attract.
A better way to write job ads
If top talent isn’t applying, it’s worth looking less at the talent pool and more at the message on your front door. That mindset change alone changes what you lead with. For example, instead of just listing the role title and an “About Us” paragraph, give the emotional hooks more prominence. Think of what questions candidates will be pondering when they’re reading a job ad:
- What problem is this role solving? (challenge/purpose)
- What decisions will I genuinely own? (autonomy)
- What does success look like after six or twelve months? (mastery)
- What support exists to help me excel? (management and culture)
Good job ads are honest. They don’t promise total flexibility or perfect balance. They acknowledge trade-offs. Excellent candidates will always prefer honesty, so being upfront about constraints won’t scare them off.
You don’t need better buzzwords in job ads. You need better signals.
Business advisor Shani Taylor is the founder of ScaledUp.io
