Hiring in Public: The Brand Audit Hiding in Your Job Advert

The job advert is the one piece of branding most small firms publish with nobody checking it. It gets written at 10pm by whoever had a spare hour, posted to Indeed and LinkedIn, and then it sits there for six weeks doing unpaid brand work in front of every candidate within a twenty-mile radius. Meanwhile the About page — three meetings, a photographer, a round of edits — gets a few dozen visits a month, a decent share of them from your mum.

We spend a lot of time on this site talking about shopfronts, vans, receipts and email signatures: the surfaces that quietly tell strangers who you are. The recruitment advert belongs on that list. It is a shopfront with a very specific audience standing outside it, and it is often the only time a stranger reads several hundred words about your business in one go, voluntarily, with their full attention.

Which is a gift, if you treat it like one.

Why the advert carries more weight than the About page

A candidate reading your advert is not in browsing mode. They are comparing four or five firms, usually on a phone, usually at night, usually because something has gone sideways at their current job. They are reading closely. They will notice whether you named the pay, whether the hours are honest, whether the person who wrote it has ever actually done the job.

Customers read adverts too. Staff pages are public, and a surprising number of people check who works somewhere before they buy from it. What they find shapes the picture — and they rarely mention it.

The clichés, translated

Most rushed adverts are built from the same dozen phrases, and each one says something you probably did not intend:

• 'Fast-paced environment' reads as: we are understaffed and you will be chasing it.
• 'Competitive salary' reads as: we would rather not say, which means it is not.
• 'Family feel' reads as: boundaries are blurred and we will ask you to cover.
• 'Wear many hats' reads as: the role has never been defined.
• 'Salary dependent on experience' reads as: we will decide once you have told us what you currently earn.
• 'Must be a self-starter' reads as: there is no induction.
• 'Work hard, play hard' reads as: there is a table football and the hours are long.

None of this is inevitable. It is what happens when an advert is written from a template rather than from the actual job.

Three questions, nine words

Anyone scanning a listing is trying to answer three things: what does it pay, what are the hours, and what will I actually be doing on a Tuesday in February. Dodge any of the three and the candidate fills the gap themselves — and people fill gaps pessimistically. A vague salary does not read as flexible, it reads as low. Vague hours do not read as reasonable, they read as 'some weekends, probably'.

Being specific is not just kinder. It filters. An advert that says '£13.20 an hour, Monday to Friday, 8 til 4.30, no weekends, based at the Bristol site' will pull in fewer applications and better ones. That is the trade, and for most small firms it is worth making every time.

The stripping exercise

Here is something you can do this afternoon with one live advert. Print it, or paste it into a document you can edit — do not work inside the posting form, where you will be tempted to tinker rather than cut.

First, delete every adjective. All of them. 'Dynamic', 'vibrant', 'friendly', 'ambitious', 'growing'. Read what is left. If the advert now says nothing, the adjectives were doing all the work.

Second, circle every claim and ask what proof you would accept. If you have written 'we invest in training', the proof is a number — '£600 per person per year' — or a name — 'you will spend your first week shadowing Priya'. Anything you cannot evidence is a claim candidates have heard before and quietly stopped believing.

Third, swap abstractions for specifics. Not 'flexible working' but 'start any time between 7 and 9.30'. Not 'a supportive team' but 'four people, two of whom have been here over five years, and a manager who works the same rota'. Not 'great progression' but 'two of our three supervisors joined in this role'.

Fourth, rewrite the opening paragraph as though a friend had asked what the job is. You will almost certainly say something better than 'an exciting opportunity has arisen'.

Fifth, bin the closing line. 'Apply now' and 'we look forward to hearing from you' are the recruitment equivalent of 'kind regards' — fine, invisible, a wasted sentence. Put in something only your firm could write. 'If you want to see the workshop before you apply, just ask — we will make time on a Friday.'

Do all five and the advert will probably end up half the length. That is normal. Good adverts are short because they are specific, not the other way round.

What survives the strip

What is left once the vocabulary has gone is the part that does the real brand work: the tone, the honesty, the small details that could only have come from a real place. A firm that names the pay, admits the job is repetitive in February, and says out loud that the early start is non-negotiable is making a bigger statement than any tagline. It is saying: we tell you the truth.

That is the same promise your shopfront, your van and your email signature are making. The advert is just the loudest version of it, aimed at a smaller room.

A five-minute check before you post

Read the advert back and ask: could a competitor publish this word for word? If yes, it is not yours yet. Does it name the pay, the hours and the location? If not, fix that before anything else. Would someone doing the job today recognise it as their job? If not, ask them. And finally — if a customer read it, would they think better of you, or quietly revise their opinion?

Recruitment adverts feel like admin. They are not. They are one of the few places a small firm gets to describe itself at length, to an audience paying full attention. Write it like that and the right people will notice. The wrong ones will filter themselves out, which is the entire point.