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Hot Tip #28 - The Anatomy of a Great Ad

By Lou Adler, September 11, 2007

If you want to attract top people online, your ads need to be outrageous, compelling and found. To prove it we're launching our first annual outrageous ad writing contest. To win a fully-paid scholarship to Recruiter Boot Camp Online (a $1200 value!) you need to follow these guidelines on how to write and post ads that really pull in top people. We'll also award a second scholarship if you can get better results doing it a different way, but I personally wouldn't waste my time. With that said, here's the template we've used to write ads to successfully attract great candidates from entry-level to executive.

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

Recruiter Hot Tips, Recruiter Training, Sourcing

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1. A standout title is a prerequisite. Forget the boring stuff, standout and be noticed. Titles must be visible, big, bold, and attract the attention of the right audience. One of our clients, a major bank, ran an ad for tellers with the title "Are You a Desperate Housewife?" to attract moms who wanted to be home when the kids finished school in order to fill the 10AM to 3PM shift. It worked. We ran an ad for CEO for a major not-for-profit with the title "CEO - Back to the Future." For a major call center we ran an extremely successful ad in 2002 to attract 18-20 year old high school grads with the title "Yeah Baby Yeah, This Entry-level Sales Job in Dallas is Shagadelic!" The ad ran the day the Austin Powers movie opened. The key here: the wording in the titles were different, non-traditional, and they were targeted to a specific audience.


2. Create a buzz in the first two sentences. A job posting is like a direct mail marketing piece in that you only have 10-20 seconds to capture the reader's attention. For the CEO ad above, we started the ad copy with this single line "Fast Forward Five Years." The next line said, "The inner city of Philadelphia would like to thank you for raising $50 million and improving our lives." The rest of the ad supported this initial opening, but we knew we needed to hook candidates right away with something they felt was important. We got two finalists from this ad. One was placed on theladders.com and the other was included in a ZoomInfo Jobcast email.


3. Describe what's in it for the candidate, not the company. Stop saying "We want a self-motivated team player to take responsibility for our accounting department." This is self-serving and counter-productive. Instead, emphasize the benefits for the candidate. For the call center job mentioned earlier the copy said "Sales experience is absolutely not required. Instead we're looking for someone who has the heart and desire to become as strong as they possibly can be. We'll give you the opportunity to get there."


4. Focus on what the person will learn, do, and become. Top people are excited by the challenges and opportunities in the job, not be the amount of experience they possess. For the teller position we described the training program and the chance to earn the security licenses needed to become an investment advisor.


5. Minimize qualifications. While you need to mention qualifications, don't over-do it. For an accounting manager job requiring a CPA, five years industry experience and strong reporting and controls background, we said "Use your CPA to create an international financial reporting system." Candidates are more excited about what they'll be doing with their skills, rather than the absolute level of the skills that they posses. For an engineering director, we said "Build a team of techno-gurus to design next gen power systems," rather than "... must have 10 years of increasing supervisory responsibility in the power controls industry with a BSEE absolutely required, with an MSEE highly preferred." Which job would you apply to even if you had the requisite background?


6. Make it fun. Being corny helps. It demonstrates your culture and makes light of the serious nature of work. For a small service company, we ran an ad that said "Win this office manager's job. Free desk, free PC and free telephone system included. Send your resume in for a chance to win this job and order the GM around. He desperately needs your direction and guidance." The company hired the person within hours after the ad ran. Running the traditional Office Manager ad for three straight weeks produced no viable candidates.


7. Make sure the ad can be found. First Google your ad before you post it. For a CFO search we conducted a Google search with these terms "CFO New York CPA public" and saw similar jobs on theladders.com and one on the Financial Executives Institute website. We posted an outrageous ad on both sites and found two strong candidates within one day. We also did something similar on careerbuilder.com for a staff engineering job and examined closely the ads that were on the first page. We made sure our ad had the same keywords and paid a bit extra to come to the top of the listings. For a sales director we used a pay-per-click approach to see if candidates would click on Google's paid searches on the right. They did.

Write an ad right now using the above guidelines and post it on your favorite board. Then reverse engineer the ad and modify it so it comes to the top of the listing. Post it to those job boards that appear on the first page of the Google search. Craigslist.com will probably be there. After three days, send us your results including a copy of the ad. While the best ad with the best results will win the free Recruiter Boot Camp Online training and certifiaction course, the real prize is all of the great candidates you'll find that you wouldn't have attracted otherwise. (Note: even if you don't win the grand prize you should still attend Recruiter Boot Camp Online. At boot camp you'll learn how to recruit and close them as well as get additional referrals.)