5 Crucial and Funny Mistakes in Vacancy Announcements

2018-06-06

Nowadays a candidate looking for a job is surrounded by a great number of job offers - on the job sites, boards and of course, in advertisements. As a rule, the increased number of vacancy announcements leads to the fact that the candidate becomes picky while reviewing offers. Any mistake in the vacancy announcement may become fatal - the perfect candidate will simply “walk by”.
What are the most wide-spread mistakes while completing the vacancy announcement?

A vacancy with a mysterious title

As a rule, the candidate looks through the list of vacancies hoping to find “that perfect one” or a couple of those that attract attention. And the employer has to take the trouble to attract the candidate’s attention. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t. For example, you need to fill the position of a call centre operator. It is quite difficult to stand out from hundreds of similar vacancies, especially by the name. Of course, you can title the announcement as an interviewer, if the employee will have to communicate with subscribers actively. However, titling it as “a junior specialist of the client information service of small and medium-sized business”, as a rule, means losing that part of the impatient audience who will not finish reading the title and go on looking for something clearer and more usual. Or those specialists who look for the job of the operator, but on more attractive conditions. If this doesn’t stop you - all right.
By the way, this applies not only to operators. Many vacancy titles are like spy codes. “The leading specialist of Credit Administration Division of legal entities”, “the Director of projects and programs of managing the reforming of the financial sector”, “the sales manager of road signs and means of traffic organization”, “the master of bonecraft”, “the categorial manager (bread, cakes, eggs)" - all in all, in each professional sphere and city there are such “masterpieces”. It is clear that the employer is trying to make the position and the duties of the future colleague as clear as possible for themselves. But the key words are “for themselves”. How clear this “for themselves” will be for the target audience is a good question and you should ask it yourself every time before publishing an announcement.

A “mile long” vacancy

If a vacancy announcement starts with the company description of two or free full paragraphs, continues with a list of demands of 15-20 items and the same number of duties, there is a great risk that the candidate will stop reading well before the best part - the description of the salary for all these. By the way, such vacancies either lack the part “We offer…” completely, or it consists of two-three common statements.
It is clear that the description of the managerial post or the post of a highly qualified specialist is hard to fit into one sentence, but you shouldn’t waste the candidate’s attention on platitudes. It is even worse if the list of the specialist’s functions is copied from the job description and is an example of terrible gobbledygook - for instance, “conducting activities aimed at the recovery of receivables”. It is probably better to point the differences that are key ones for your vacancy, so an experienced professional can assess its benefits or disadvantages (for themselves, of course).

A vacancy “for nothing”

It is when the vacancy announcement mentions a lot of duties and demands (sometimes even more than for one position), but the only benefits it offers are a stable job and a friendly staff of professionals. Seeing such disproportion is especially frustrating if it is a position of a highly qualified professional or a managerial post - it means that the employer is ready to demand to the fullest extent of the job description but is not quick to reward. Most probably, they even don’t have such a practice introduced.
Nowadays, when the salaries are quite equal everywhere - market average - candidates read the text of the vacancy announcement carefully and compare the size and kind of incentive and motivational components that can differ offers of competing employers. That is why such employer’s thrift can be perceived as a simple employer's desire to save on salaries and projected to possible problems with the salary itself - for example, it will be hard to get a pay rise.

A pretentious vacancy

Such a text is filled with jokes or references to high philosophies which can be controversial or out of place. For example, a sentence “Some people are looking for a job, some - for a calling and some - for the meaning of life. In our team, everyone has found what they want. Now it is your turn :)” - and this is the vacancy of a cook. Hardly the candidate for cooks is ready to look for the meaning of life in the workplace… Or “We are looking for a master of sales, a virtuoso of communications, an author of the most adventurous topics and finally a person able to sell milk even to a cow :)” - again, it is hard to predict, what kind of adventures can be tolerated by the employer. Or if they will be ready to settle the consequences of their highly adventurous subordinates’ actions. On the one hand, if it is a merry collective of creative personalities, such a vacancy announcement will be quite acceptable. However, if a vacancy to a serious financial company will end with the words: “If you strive for a good job, show initiative: define your interests and test your abilities, study the industry and become a professional in it. Best regards, your Career and Salary” - not all the candidates can comprehend the text of the announcement with proper seriousness. So before “going rogue” describing the future job, it is probably worth synchronizing novelties in job description with the corporate culture, written values and simply the accepted style of communication in the company.

A trite and careless vacancy

Yes, that is also important now. That is why you should spare phrases about a young friendly team and the constantly growing company till the interview. Also, you need to spend enough time to check the text of the announcement for mistakes or nonsenses. For example: “A well-equipped workplace in the office suited 10 minutes away from an underground station”. Or “susceptibility to scrupulous work”. There are dozens of such examples. On the one hand, such mistakes don’t seem to be a blunder in texts of worker vacancies, but they tell a lot about the HR-specialist’s literacy and the attitude to the quality of work on the whole to an office employee or an experienced and highly qualified specialist.
That is why the vacancy announcement must be completed correctly:

• You should make a bright and attractive description of yourself as an employer. One paragraph distinguishing your company from the number of competing ones is quite enough. It is important that the candidate understands “why you”.


• You need to describe your demands and the appropriate reward clearly and unambiguously - and balance your advantages (the flexible schedule, lunches, classes of foreign languages or a tennis table) and disadvantages (the office is far, but there is a bus station nearby, days off are not strictly weekends - but there is an opportunity to work remotely on certain days).


• You should point out the peculiarities of your corporate culture that are important for your target audience. For example, if it is young specialists, tell more about development and career growth. Mature specialists value other criteria such as wages and the professional development, the status and they all should be mentioned.

The number of vacancies has grown three times for the past two years, so the employer has to put more and more efforts to attract and keep an employee. And if your company is not a “dream company” for the candidate and doesn’t offer sky-high salaries, you will have to try hard to make the candidate pay attention to your vacancy and reply to it. So, the fewer mistakes of the stated above you make, the more chances you have to interest the candidates with the work in your company.