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Attract Top Talent with These 3 Proven Copywriting Techniques for Job Ads

August 11, 2023

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Copywriting is a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy, and it's no different when it comes to job ads. In today's competitive job market, attracting top talent requires more than just listing job requirements and responsibilities. To stand out from the crowd and entice the best candidates, recruiters and hiring agencies need to employ proven copywriting techniques that captivate and engage. In this article, we will explore three powerful copywriting techniques to help you create job ads that attract top talent.

Understanding your target audience

Before delving into the copywriting techniques, it is essential to understand your target audience. In the case of job ads, there are three primary groups you need to consider:

  • Recruiters
  • Candidates
  • Staffing/Hiring Agencies

Recruiters are the individuals responsible for finding and evaluating potential candidates for job openings. They play a critical role in the hiring process, as they are the first point of contact between the candidate and the company. Recruiters need job ads that effectively communicate the requirements and expectations of the position, allowing them to identify suitable candidates efficiently.

Candidates are the individuals seeking job opportunities. They are often bombarded with numerous job ads, making it essential for your ad to stand out from the rest. Candidates are looking for job ads that not only highlight the requirements of the position but also convey the benefits and opportunities it offers.

Staffing/Hiring agencies act as intermediaries between companies seeking talent and candidates looking for job opportunities. They rely on compelling job ads to attract suitable candidates and secure successful placements. By understanding the needs and expectations of recruiters, candidates, and hiring agencies, you can tailor your copywriting approach to resonate with each group and maximize your chances of attracting top talent.

Copywriting technique #1: Creating compelling headlines

The headline of a job ad is the first thing that candidates see. It serves as a hook to capture their attention and entice them to read further. To create compelling headlines, you need to focus on two key elements: relevance and intrigue.

Relevance ensures that your headline speaks directly to the candidates you are targeting. Use keywords that are specific to the job position and industry to make it clear who the ad is intended for. For example, instead of a generic headline like "Job Opening for Marketing Professional," you could use a more specific and targeted headline like "Digital Marketing Specialist - Join Our Growing Team."

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Intrigue is about piquing the curiosity of candidates and motivating them to learn more about the job opportunity. You can achieve this by highlighting unique aspects of the position or emphasizing the impact the candidate can make. For instance, a headline like "Make a Difference - Lead Our Social Impact Initiatives as a Program Manager" creates intrigue and sparks the candidate's interest in exploring the job further.

Remember, the headline is your first chance to make an impression. By crafting compelling headlines that are relevant and intriguing, you increase the chances of attracting top talent to your job ads.

Copywriting technique #2: Highlighting the benefits of the job

Job seekers are not only interested in the requirements and responsibilities of a position; they also want to know what's in it for them. To attract top talent, your job ad should clearly communicate the benefits and opportunities that come with the role.

Start by identifying the unique selling points (USPs) of the job. These could include things like career growth prospects, training and development opportunities, flexible work arrangements, or a vibrant company culture. Once you have identified the USPs, incorporate them into your job ad in a way that resonates with your target audience.

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For example, instead of simply stating that your company offers training opportunities, you could say, "Unlock Your Potential - Join our team and gain access to personalized training programs designed to enhance your skills and propel your career to new heights." By highlighting the benefits of the job, you create a compelling narrative that attracts top talent and sets your job ad apart from the competition.

Copywriting technique #3: Using persuasive language and storytelling

Humans are wired to respond to stories. By incorporating storytelling techniques into your job ads, you can create a deeper emotional connection with candidates and make your ad more memorable. Use persuasive language that evokes emotions and paints a vivid picture of the job and its potential impact.

Start by describing the company's mission and values, and how the job aligns with them. Share success stories of previous employees who have excelled in similar roles and how it transformed their careers. Use testimonials or quotes from current employees to add credibility and authenticity to your job ad.

For example, instead of stating that your company is seeking a highly motivated individual, you could say, "Join our team of passionate individuals who are making a real difference in the world. Hear from our employees about their incredible journey with us."

By combining persuasive language with storytelling, you create a narrative that engages candidates on a deeper level and compels them to take action.

Examples of successful job ads using these copywriting techniques

To illustrate the effectiveness of these copywriting techniques, let's take a look at some real-life examples of successful job ads:

  • Company X - Marketing Manager: "Drive Innovation - Lead our dynamic marketing team and shape the future of our industry. Join us in revolutionizing the way brands connect with consumers."
  • Company Y - Software Engineer: "Unleash Your Creativity - Join our team of brilliant minds and develop groundbreaking software solutions that transform industries. Don't settle for ordinary, be part of the extraordinary."
  • Company Z - Sales Representative: "Unlimited Earning Potential - Become a key player in our high-performing sales team and unlock unparalleled growth opportunities. Join us in exceeding targets and redefining success."

These examples demonstrate how effective copywriting techniques can create job ads that captivate and entice top talent.

How staffing agencies can utilize copywriting techniques in their job ads

Staffing agencies play a vital role in connecting companies with talented candidates. By utilizing the copywriting techniques discussed, staffing agencies can create job ads that attract both clients and candidates.

When crafting job ads for clients, staffing agencies should focus on clearly communicating the unique selling points of each position, highlighting the benefits of partnering with the agency, and showcasing successful placements. By presenting a compelling narrative, staffing agencies can position themselves as the go-to resource for companies seeking top talent.

Copywriter Recruitment Agency | Copywriting jobs | Blackad

When creating job ads for candidates, staffing agencies should employ the same techniques discussed earlier. Craft compelling headlines that resonate with the target audience, emphasize the benefits and opportunities of each job, and utilize persuasive language and storytelling to engage candidates on an emotional level.

By employing these copywriting techniques, staffing agencies can differentiate themselves in the market and attract top talent for their clients.

Tips for measuring the success of your copywriting efforts in job ads

To ensure the effectiveness of your copywriting efforts in job ads, it is crucial to measure their impact. Here are a few tips to help you measure the success of your copywriting:

  • Track application rates: Monitor the number of applications received for each job ad. A significant increase in application rates indicates that your copywriting techniques are resonating with candidates.
  • Analyze candidate quality: Assess the quality of candidates applying for the position. Look for indicators such as relevant experience, qualifications, and cultural fit. A higher number of qualified candidates suggests that your job ad is attracting the right talent.
  • Seek candidate feedback: Reach out to candidates who have applied for the position and ask for feedback on the job ad. Their insights can provide valuable information on how well your copywriting techniques are working.
  • Compare conversion rates: Measure the conversion rates from application to interview, and from interview to hire. If you see an improvement in these conversion rates, it indicates that your job ad is effectively attracting and engaging top talent.

By consistently monitoring and analyzing these metrics, you can refine your copywriting approach and continue to improve the effectiveness of your job ads.

Conclusion

Effective copywriting is a powerful tool in attracting top talent through job ads. By understanding your target audience, crafting compelling headlines, highlighting the benefits of the job, and using persuasive language and storytelling, you can create job ads that captivate and engage candidates. Remember to measure the success of your copywriting efforts and make necessary adjustments to continuously improve your results.

Attracting top talent is a competitive endeavor, but with the right copywriting techniques, you can set yourself apart and attract the best candidates for your organization. So, embrace the power of copywriting and start creating job ads that leave a lasting impression.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

  • Build positive brand awareness
  • Make your audience stick around for longer
  • Get better traction on social media
  • Gain more trust of your audience than ever
  • Generate qualified leads
  • Improve conversion rates
  • Boost business visibility with SEO
  • Position your brand as an authority
  • Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

  • Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
  • Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
  • Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
  • Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
  • Types of content to be created
  • Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
  • Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
  • Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

  • Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide    
  • Continous publishing and distributing content
  • Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer

Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.

  1. Excellent Writing Skills

A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.

  1. Audience Research

Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.

  1. Keyword Research

Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.

  1. Data-oriented Content

Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..

  1. Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –

A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.

Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.

  1. Content Promotion

Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.

  1. Performance Analysis

Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.

Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.

Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

  • What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
  • How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
  • What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
  • Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
  • Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
  • What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
  • Where do they look for a new job?
  • What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

  • Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
  • Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.  
  • Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
  • Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
  • About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

  • Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
  • Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
  • Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
  • Include and optimize all content for SEO
  • Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
  • Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

  • Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
  • Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
  • A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
  • Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
  • Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
  • Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills
  • Excellent writing and editing skills
  • The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
  • The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
  • Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

  • Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
  • Why should candidates apply for the position?
  • Highlight the growth opportunities
  • State the company vision and mission
  • Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

  • LinkedIn
  • Indeed
  • Instahyre
  • ZipRecruiter
  • Monster
  • GlassDoor
  • CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

  • Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
  • Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
  • Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
  • Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
  • Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

  • Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
  • On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
  • Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
  • Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.

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