Employers often measure an advert by how many applications it draws. That is the wrong measure. Two hundred applications for one role usually means several hundred hours of screening and a signal that the advert did not say clearly enough who the job was for.
A good advert filters as much as it attracts.
Lead with the work, not the company history
Most adverts open with three paragraphs about the organisation and reach the actual job halfway down. Strong candidates — the ones already employed and not desperate — decide in the first few lines whether to keep reading.
Open with what the person will do. Not the job title, which means different things in different organisations, but the work: what they will own, who they will work with, and what success looks like in the first year.
Separate what is required from what is preferred
Long lists of requirements do measurable harm. Candidates who meet most but not all criteria — disproportionately women, in most studies — self-select out, while candidates who meet few apply anyway. You lose the people you wanted and keep the volume you did not.
Split the list honestly:
- Essential: the three or four things without which someone genuinely cannot do the job
- Preferred: everything else, clearly marked as a bonus
If your essential list has nine items, you are describing two jobs or an unrealistic person.
Say what it pays
Salary secrecy is normal in this market and it costs employers time. Without a figure, candidates apply blind and both sides discover the mismatch at offer stage, after several rounds of interviews.
A range, even a wide one, filters at the top of the funnel where filtering is cheap. It also reduces the risk that you underpay a candidate who negotiates poorly and then loses them within a year to an employer who did not.
Be specific about the conditions
State the things people will otherwise ask in the first phone call: location and whether the role travels, working hours, whether it is a fixed-term or permanent position, and any requirement that would rule someone out — a driving licence, a professional registration, willingness to be posted upcountry.
Every one of those left vague produces a shortlist that shrinks at the offer stage.
Write requirements you can actually assess
"Excellent communication skills" appears in almost every advert and is assessed in almost none. If a requirement cannot be tested at interview, it is decoration.
Replace it with the observable version: "able to present monthly figures to a management meeting and answer questions on them". That you can test, and the wording tells the candidate what the job actually involves.
Make applying simple
Every additional step loses candidates. Ask for what you need to shortlist — a CV and a short covering note — and leave certificates, references and forms until after the first sift.
Give a closing date and, more importantly, tell people when they will hear back. Then do it. An employer with a reputation for silence eventually finds that good candidates stop bothering.
The advert is a screening tool
The strongest adverts tell candidates plainly what would make this job wrong for them: the pace, the travel, the reporting line, the parts that are genuinely difficult. That honesty feels risky and it works, because the people who apply anyway have chosen the job with their eyes open — and they stay longer.
A workable structure
- The job in one paragraph: what you will do and own
- What success looks like after twelve months
- Essential requirements — three or four, testable
- Preferred requirements, marked as such
- Salary range, location, hours, contract type
- How to apply, closing date, and when candidates will hear
Half a page, and it will do more filtering than the next three rounds combined.
