is your job advertisement driving the best candidates away?
most employers treat a job advertisement as a net. in practice it behaves more like a gate, and the people it shuts out are usually the ones you most wanted in
there are really only two things an advertisement has to do, and both are easy to get wrong. it has to appeal to the people reading it, and it has to not scare off the capable ones who don't tick every single box. an advertisement is first-and-foremost a piece of marketing, not an internal record and not a "filter"
since the person you want is likely to already be employed, reasonably happy, they are probably giving your role 10-20 seconds before they decide whether to read on. if it's flat, or generic, or reads like something that wandered out of an hr document library, they're gone. getting it right is the difference between a good candidate finishing the ad and a good candidate closing the tab
the second problem is where the real damage happens, and it's all in the requirements. people read a requirements list literally. a conscientious candidate treats every line as a hard rule and measures themselves against it honestly. when you ask for two years' experience and someone has eighteen months, they don't apply. they take the list at its word, and you never hear from the person you'd love to have spoken with
the greater issue is that it isn't the weak candidates who rule themselves out, it's the strong ones. the capable specialist who falls a little short on one line is exactly the sort who won't chance it, while the less suitable but more self-assured candidate fires off an application regardless. over-specify, and you thin out the good people and keep the overconfident ones. You've skewed your own shortlist the wrong way
it's worth saying that this usually isn't carelessness. it tends to be either you've tried to spell out precisely what you want and kept piling on parameters, believing that more detail sharpens the field. or someone's taken the hr department's formal position description and pasted it straight into the ad. those are two different documents doing two different jobs. one is an internal governance record. the other is marketing. publish the first where the second belongs and you filter out the very people you were trying to attract
underneath both is a single mistaken belief, which is that the advertisement can do your filtering for you. it can't. a requirements list doesn't sort people by who can do the job. it sorts them by who's willing to disqualify themselves. the real filtering happens when you review the applications, and that's the step you're skipping. by over-specifying, you're trying to save yourself the bother of sifting through irrelevant applicants, which is understandable. but the price is that you never get to see the application from the candidate who covers most of the boxes and not quite all of them, because they've already ruled themselves out before you had the chance to weigh them up. that review was exactly where they belonged
the fix isn't to ask for less. it's to be honest about what actually matters. work out the small handful of things someone genuinely must have to be worth a look, and treat everything else as a preference, not a gate. nobody honestly believes a candidate is unsuitable at eighteen months and suddenly ideal at two years, yet written as a flat requirement, that's exactly how the line reads, and that's exactly how a good candidate will read it on their way out the door
next time you post a role, ask yourself the simple version of all this. is this advertisement bringing the best people to the table, or is it handing them a reason to stay away?
