Failing to spark someone’s interest in the span of a few short seconds can mean a perfectly qualified professional will skip your job and apply for another.

Writing fun, smart, incisive job posts is part of our everyday work as recruiters. Given that it regularly takes nearly two months to fill professional roles, you can’t afford to miss out on the right person.

We’ve developed a system to make each post unique and engaging without the need to spend unnecessary time or energy crafting a literary masterpiece for every role. Here’s how it works:

First, consider the big picture

Branding

Job posts don’t exist in a vacuum – they’re a vital extension of your company that will be seen and judged by thousands of people in your industry. Maintaining a carefully crafted organizational structure applied to each and every job post is essential to keeping your brand consistent. If your job posts feel jumbled and sloppy, your brand will appear similarly disorganized.

Directionality

The goal of a job post is to guide people toward the application button. Streamlining your posts and adding easy visual markers (bold headers, bullet points) will help people as they move through the description toward your call to action.

Personality

Job posts are the perfect place to showcase your culture! Using a boilerplate template just won’t cut it in today’s tight market. Job seekers want to engage with something real – not a personality’less corporate entity.

Second, jump into the details – title, introduction, body, call to action

Title

Your post title should be short and descriptive. If there are multiple titles for the same role, use the one that people are most likely to Google (the one that applies to the most possible people).

If you’re willing to publicize the salary, you can include a salary bracket in the title to significantly increase clicks to your post.

Introduction

Instead of listing excessive requirements in the introduction, focus on the most attractive aspects of the job – i.e., this position reports directly to the CEO, has mentorship opportunities, you’ll be able to hand-pick your own team, etc. Be friendly and personable while sticking to the most important points. 2-3 sentences should suffice.

*Tip 1: Spending time on the front-end to develop 5-6 stock introductions will save you time and stress later on. These stock introductions don’t have to be boring or devoid of personality – they can be just as fun and spunky as your company!

*Tip 2: The words you use matter. Read about how the Gender Decoder can help remove biased wording from your job posts.

Body – Requirements and Responsibilities

First – don’t call them ‘requirements’ and ‘responsibilities.’ There are so many more exciting words you can choose for your headers; instead of requirements, try ‘who you are,’ ‘a successful person will have…’ ‘ideal background,’ etc. For responsibilities, you can try ‘life on the job,’ ‘what you’ll do,’ ‘The job at a glance,’ and so on.

Second – keep it short! 3-5 strong bullet points describing the job should be enough to give job seekers a good idea of what they’ll be doing. Extra information won’t only bore them, but it can actually decrease diversity numbers as women – much more than men – avoid jobs for which they are not 100% qualified. Any unnecessary qualifications can therefore act to deter women.

Call to action

A good call to action reinforces why people should make the effort to reach out to you and upload their resume.

Strong example: Please email your resume to xxx@provenrecruiting.com if you’d like to work alongside some of the finest engineers in the blockchain space.

“Meh” example: Please email your resume to xxx@provenrecruiting.com if you meet the requisite experience and are interested in hearing more about this role.

Diversity statement

Forego the tired ‘we are an equal opportunity employer’ line and write something that feels genuine to your company and culture. Append this statement to the end of every single job post to increase interest from diverse candidate pools. See other tips to improve diversity hiring here.

Sample jobs from our own job board:

Manufacturing Engineer

Rare opportunity: help shape one of San Diego’s fastest growing companies! You’ll have the opportunity to make a substantial impact on the development of the manufacturing team and will report directly to the VP of Manufacturing. Don’t miss the chance to contribute to an outstanding culture and help advance the growth and direction of a quickly innovating, well-respected company.

Who you are:

• 4+ years hands-on manufacturing engineer experience is a must
• A 4-year college graduate with a degree in Engineering (bonus points for Mechanical or Manufacturing!)
• You love to design, develop and drive manufacturing processes to support improvements, customers, and products
• You thrive in a collaborative work environment and show accountability, integrity, respect & trust
• Distinguished communicator, strong problem solver, and highly organized

What you’ll do:

• You will create product drawings, manufacturing instructions, and work instructions for new products, machining, fabrication, assembly fixtures, and tooling
• Administer daily technical support for the factory floor, generate cost reduction and continuous improvement ideas and implement those ideas
• Evaluate and develop an understanding of current and potential process capabilities and process control limits. Implement statistical process control (SPC) where appropriate
• Implement on-the-job training to production employees and supervisors, ensuring all work is performed in a diligent, complete, and cost-effective manner

Please email your resume to bcortez@provenrecruiting.com if you’d like to work alongside some of the finest engineers in the Manufacturing/Mechanical space.

Note: We actively support and promote people of various backgrounds, from race, religion and gender to geographical area, university, lifestyle and personality type. Proven Recruiting is minority-owned, majority women, and is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in the broader community. Apply today!

Looking for more hiring guides? You may be interested in these articles:

• Reimagining the interview process
• Do temporary workers pose a threat to company culture?
• Why you should let your best employees leave
• How much will a recruiter cost my company?