Copywriting for recruiters: 5 tips to attract candidates
Recruiting and marketing have more in common than you might think. At their core, both functions aim to sell something to a target audience through persuasive communications and compelling experiences.
Marketing is trying to sell a product to consumers, and recruiting is trying to sell a company’s culture and opportunities to candidates.
This means that there’s a lot we can learn in the talent acquisition world from our peers in marketing. One of these areas is copywriting. Since quality copy can make a big difference in helping you to achieve your candidate attraction goals, here is some initial info and a few tips to improve your efforts here.
First things first, what is copywriting?
According to Hubspot, copywriting is “one of the most critical elements of any and all forms of marketing and advertising. Copywriting consists of the words, either written or spoken, marketers use to try to get people to take an action after reading or hearing them.”
In recruiting, copywriting comes into play in job postings, social media posts, careers blogs, candidate communications, career site content, and any other touchpoint a candidate has with your organization during the hiring process. The first impression a candidate develops about your company will often be the result of the copy you use.
The words and tone you pick can be the difference between candidates taking the next step in your process (submitting an application, accepting an offer, etc.) or ignoring you altogether and pursuing another employer – an employer whose messaging approach better resonates with them.
To help make sure you’re not missing out on qualified candidates because of your copy approach, here are 5 copywriting tips to help you stand out and better connect with the candidates you're looking to attract.
1) Personalize the message
Do you prefer when a candidate submits a customized cover letter or one that is obviously templated? You likely prefer when candidates submit customized cover letters for the very same reason that candidates prefer employers who personalize their messaging — it shows you value the other party’s time. It also gives candidates an indication of how they will be treated as an employee too.
To create personalized messaging, it’s often a good idea to start by thinking about the type of person you’re trying to attract. To do so, you might build candidate personas and a specific message bank that applies to that group based on your persona research. Your copy should take into account the interests a specific talent segment might have, alongside career pain points, aspirations, and other factors.
From there, think about this strategic approach and leverage your message bank when you’re doing outbound lead generation activities, like sending InMails on LinkedIn.
You can also think about personalizing your messages at scale using some sort of technology tool. Many modern Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) platforms provide this functionality now. This means that when you’re sending candidate nurture emails or updating people on their status within your hiring process, you can auto-pull in their name and other pieces of information.
2) Communicate the “what’s in it for me”
Your copy should draw people in and explain the “what’s in it for me” factor as quickly as possible. People tend to skim web content and they won’t pay attention to your message if it isn’t immediately obvious why it’s worth investing their time.
This is particularly the case when it comes to job descriptions, social media ads and posts, and InMail reach outs. In all of these cases it can be helpful to lead with your employee value proposition (EVP) in order to draw people in.
For those unfamiliar with an EVP, your EVP is a platform composed of messaging and visuals that overviews the value a candidate can expect to get when they come to work with you. It answers questions like:
Why do people decide to come work at your organization?
What makes them stick around long term?
What sets your organization apart from hiring competitors?
If you want to learn more about uncovering your EVP, we’d recommend taking a look at this blog: How to uncover your organization’s employee value proposition (EVP): a 7-step process.
The final version of your EVP messaging platform should be structured in a way that makes it easy to pull pieces from your various core pillars and tie them into the candidate content and communications you’re writing.
3) Use approachable, simple words
Often the talent segments you’re addressing may be highly educated and can certainly understand when you use longer words, but they’re also pressed for time and their attention is divided.
By using shorter words that are easy to absorb quickly, you increase the chances that someone will actually engage with your messaging. As a general rule, try to keep your copy to a grade eight reading level – even for highly educated audiences. You can use the Flesch readability score to double check that your content is hitting the mark here.
If you take a look back through this blog post, you’ll notice that we’ve tried to pick the shortest words possible to make this blog easy and fast to read.
4) Keep your paragraphs short
According to a study by Microsoft, the average human attention span is now a mere 8 seconds (potentially even shorter). This is why it’s important to be really direct with your web writing so you don’t lose people.
As already covered, this applies at the level of the words you choose, but also at the level of the paragraphs you’re writing too. Try to keep your paragraphs to a max of two-three sentences tops to keep people engaged (again, take a look back at our blog to see how we put this into play!).
If you’re having trouble condensing your copy, consider running it through Hemingway — a free writing tool named after the author, Earnest Hemingway, who was known for his incredibly concise writing.
5) Accompany your copy with visuals
The human brain absorbs visuals 60,000 times faster than it absorbs text (Entrepreneur). If you can find a way to communicate your message visually, you’ll have an easier time grabbing a candidate’s attention. In addition, not only are readers 80% more willing to read your copy if it has visuals, but they’re also able to retain 55% more information from copy paired with visuals.
This means that candidates are likely to remember your employer brand if you communicate it visually — and even if they’re not ready for a career transition now, they may recall your organization when the timing is right.
In addition, by sprinkling visuals throughout a longer-form piece of written content, you’ll encourage people to keep moving through the content in order to reach the next visual.
This is also a really good move from an SEO standpoint, as search engines favour pages with lots of images over web pages with only text content. Employer blogs are a great spot for this, as are job descriptions. For some examples of outstanding visual job descriptions, take a look at this blog: Improve the conversion rate on your job descriptions with these 5 tips.
The takeaway here is that by simply communicating your message visually or mixing images in with your copy, you’ll increase the chances that candidates will read, remember, and take action in response to a written message.
To achieve this, you might see if your marketing team can help you produce some visual assets that communicate elements of your EVP. You can also get in touch with our team if you’re looking for support on this but don’t have the in-house resources to be able to produce visuals to improve your candidate communications.
Measuring the results of your copywriting as a recruiter
Using any of the above tips is only half the battle. The other important part is to track what’s working so you can continue to tweak your approach and see results over time.
To be able to accurately track the progression of your copywriting efforts over time, you should measure your baselines as they currently stand. Any of the following three measurements could be affected by copywriting changes and are worth keeping track of:
Visits to your career site from social media and job site profiles
Conversion rates from site visitors to applicants
Response rate to InMails or other reach outs
You may, for example, notice that adding visuals to your job postings results in more, higher-quality candidates applying over time. If this is the case, it will confirm that you should continue to look for opportunities to infuse your job postings with visual elements and add them to more pieces of recruiting copy where possible.
On the other hand, you might notice that after stripping your InMail message to only include the most essential and concise information, you start receiving fewer responses. By slowly reintroducing personality back into your messages, you can then track your response rate to find the perfect balance of personality and conciseness.
Of course, there are plenty of other factors that could be influencing your communication with candidates – more than could possibly be listed in one article.
Fortunately, that’s where we come in! If you’d like an audit to help identify weak points throughout your communications with candidates, figure out what’s worth measuring for your specific goals, or just need more guidance in general, send us a message. We’d love to chat with you and are always here to help.
About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.