At some point in your business journey, you’ll need to advertise for a position and define this role – this may be to fill an existing role or the first time you’re adding a new person to your team in a specific area of expertise.
Finding the right talent for your business is essential to your success and capacity for growth, and this all begins at the very start of the hiring process. How and where you share your role will all play into the quality of candidates that apply, and a winning job advertisement will streamline the process and save you time and money.
Role Definition
First step – lock in the job title you’re looking to offer the winning candidate. This is essential to get right the first time and for this title to translate well within your industry (in other words, be certain that what you’re advertising for is what the role is widely understood to be!). Use clear, common language and descriptors, even if you have creative titles for staff – this will allow you to cast a wider net for potential hires.
When scanning through open job offers, candidates will often be searching for their specific job title (and even filtering results through it), so you want to capture the right eyes on your job.
Take the time to do some light background research on the role you’re about to advertise, check out other recent job advertisements for this position and see whether they match up to your expectations of what you’re looking for this future team member to execute day-to-day.
Remember, a job title is often an indicator of experience or level of seniority, for example “director”, and this will impact the general salary and responsibility expectations for those looking to apply.
Entry-level roles should always be advertised as such, and for major job platforms like Indeed or Seek, these filters and descriptions apply in addition to the job title, but it is important to ensure these align. Some startup businesses will often give ‘director’ titles or ‘head of’ roles to almost all team members as they have a much leaner staff count, but you’re better to be realistic with your job title and role to get the right match (it’s a trickier sell for a “director” title on a base level salary, even if they have plenty of flexibility and autonomy in the role!).
If you’ve got a large business with a significant volume of staff, you may need to add additional descriptors, for example “junior account executive” or “senior art director” – this will also assist in the right applicants coming through.
Of course, this role may evolve over time as your business grows, but in the early days as you define the role, it’s better to keep it simple. Another key factor to your job role is to ensure you’re advertising for the right role to support your everyday operations – for example, sales are essential to all businesses, but some companies will bury this key task in a job title that avoids the word “sales” at all (as it can be perceived as a high-pressure role).
Candidates may apply for a “business growth lead” role thinking they are in business development or strategy, and suddenly they are sitting at a desk with a phone and a list of cold call numbers – not exactly the position they had in mind!
In short – accuracy and specificity are the names of the game when it comes to creating your job title/role title.
Rolling on from when you define the role you’re looking to fill will be the nature of the role, the type of employment, salary and of course the detailed job description which shares exactly what the responsibilities and daily tasks will entail.
Over the next 2 parts of this 3-part Job Advertising series, we will dive into these next steps so you can get the best out of your jobs being shared online, and find the perfect candidate to enhance and grow your team.
