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Conduct an online job search these days and you’re soon confronted with lots of ads, many suggesting, without actually saying it of course, that each day spent working with them will be just like dying and going to heaven, only better. But should they be taken at face value?  Is your workplace heaven? Or is it more like hell, despite what that ever so enticing advertisement that lured you there in the first place suggested? Here I take a lighthearted look at what job ads say and what they…

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Freelance copywriter Alasdair Murray on how some recruiters could gain a competitive edge over their rivals if only they thought a bit more about the messages they put out into the public domain.

 

They are there for all to see – the ‘new year, new career’ job ads that get wheeled out at the beginning of each new year. Someone somewhere clearly still thinks it’s original and a bit clever. Trust me, it’s not, nor has it been for many years. In fact, it’s become…

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...for crying out loud make the content you reach me with worth reading!

 

Seriously, the more technology advances and, as a result, the easier it becomes for any old Joe to upload content onto a website, the more creativity seems to be going out of the window, particularly in recruitment.

 

What sparked my latest rant? I read somewhere today that as there are 5 billion mobile phone users in the world it follows that many  more people in the coming months and…

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Not a single day passes by of late without hearing the dreaded words 'global talent pool', but what does that phrase actually mean in practice, if anything at all?

Consider a typical recruiting scenario. You're looking for a mid-career engineer for a specific location. There is no relocation package on offer so straight away it would be fair to assume that 99 times out of a hundred your likely candidate is going to come from a 30 or 40 mile radius of wherever the business is situated.…

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Today I am going to demonstrate two different ways of posting the same job on the web. The first way is the all too common lazy one where a recruiter simply cuts and pastes the job description and top and tails it with a bit about the client and a response mechanism. The other way is the right way, and that is, instead of cut and pasting it, to take the information from the job description and craft it into a bit of copy that not only flows, but reaches out…

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Do you see writing job ad copy as a bit of a chore? Something that you put off until the last possible minute and then hastily throw together with more than a little apprehension or doubt? Use this simple nine step guide and you’ll soon get used to a formulaic running order that will make writing copy that much easier in the future.



1) THE JOB TITLE – Start off by asking yourself is the job title an industry recognised standard or something… Continue

Let's face it, we've never before lived in an age where such a plethora of job opportunities are accessible to us at the mere touch of a button. But is this instantaneous solution really all it's cracked up to be? Is the constant search for new and supposedly better ways to reach the job seeker really an advance, or merely adding to the woes of the already stressed out candidate who, when faced with a huge list of all too often bland and uninspiring job posts, struggles to separate the wheat… Continue