WRITING EFFECTIVE EMPLOYMENT ADS

A Building Service Contractor asked me the other day what constitutes an effective recruitment ad to place on ZipRecruiter, Craig's list or in the local newspaper. A great question and after some more probing we determined what the best ad might be for his situation at the time. 

It has always been my objective in writing employment ads to use the opportunity to do some marketing as well as let potential employees know that we are an excellent place to work. Sometimes I would add in some wording to confuse my competitors. 

First let me suggest you spend the money and do the ad right. Many companies will spend thousands of dollars securing a new customer and then tell HR to keep costs down in recruiting the staff to service the new customer. Didn't you sell to the customer how great your employees were? If so, shouldn't you spend the time and money necessary to find the best people?

First, we generally ran ads that said something like 25 IMMEDIATE OPENINGS. Now for those of you that say you only have 5 openings now, my questions is, do you have 20 people you would like to get rid of if the right applicants came in the door? If your answer is yes, you have 25 immediate openings. Use whatever number you wish but here is another reason I put a number of immediate openings. 

Many of the people we employ don't have the greatest confidence and /or self esteem. If they look at an ad that says "we need an employee to work from 6-10 PM Monday through Friday", that will probably say something like "there is no use me going for that job because it will probably be filled by the time I get there. But if you use a number like 10 or 20 etc., they may look at that and say, "I can get one of those 20 jobs, and a person, who otherwise might not apply, could quite possibly become a valued employee of your company. 

Sometimes we also ran ads that had as their heading BUSINESS IS BOOMING. People like working for a successful company and this lets everyone know you are a stable organization. By the way, one side benefit of running an ad with this heading is your competitors will wonder what is going on at your company. They will try to figure out which new account you got and then check their accounts to see if they are in trouble anywhere. It's fun to do. Keeps them on their toes. 

While recruiting new staff members can be very discouraging at times it can also be a lot of fun. Put some excitement in your recruiting and it may even change YOUR attitude about finding those badly needed great employees. 

For more on the subject you can get our book--FINDING, TRAINING, AND KEEPING GREAT SERVICE EMPLOYEES. It's available at    www.consultantsincleaning.com. 

Don't forget to listen to our daily pod casts highlighting the BSCAI convention speakers. You can hear them at www.youtube.com/user/Tripodcasts.

We are really looking forward to the convention in November in Orlando. I hope all of you are planning to attend. It represents the second best learning opportunity for our industry. 

Till next time.