Why it’s Essential to Proofread your Job Adverts

The advert below (made anonymous to save face if anything) is currently live on a well-known job board. The job board in question has over 95,000 live jobs and over 9,000 hiring companies advertising on it. With all this competition, it is imperative your advert is attractive and stands out...in a good way! We’re not going to give advert writing advice in this blog (please see our previous blog here for information on how to write a good advert). Today we’re going to look at the importance of proofreading your advert and what impact it will have if you don’t. Let’s take a look at the advert, how many errors can you spot? Did you spot the errors? There are at least 8… let’s see if we got them all? We have noticed spelling, grammatical and formatting issues in this advert which we have highlighted below: We see hundreds of adverts like the one above and we understand that we can all be guilty of an oversight. It is very easy to read what you planned on saying rather than what you actually typed as our brains are programmed to predictive-read. That is why it is often less effective for the writer of something to do their own proofreading as they automatically read it the way it was intended. Fresh eyes from someone unfamiliar with the text can pick up errors that the writer may have missed much more effectively. Aside from some embarrassment here and there, you might think we’re just being pedantic picking up on these errors but there’s actually a really strong case for proofreading any published material. If you want to attract quality applicants to your job vacancy you need to ensure your advert portrays your company as professional and astute. It is likely that you will actually put applicants off your organisation if your advert contains typos and grammatical errors. Not only will they be concerned about the culture of the company but they may also think the role advertised has been rushed and not carefully considered and as such, is it valued? It can also hinder you in terms of advert optimisation on the job boards. In the above example, the misspelling of Croydon means that this advert will not show in a geographic search for that area.  If you misspell keywords they won’t be picked up in the applicant searches and, therefore, you will not get many views and applications. This can have a detrimental impact on your whole recruitment campaign; luckily most job boards allow you to edit the content of your advert to rectify it, but you must proofread it to see the errors in the first place! So please do proofread your adverts before publishing them to the job board, they reflect your company brand and you want a positive image portrayed. You may also be putting your advert in jeopardy of not coming up in searches which is an absolute essential for this online advertising platform. If you would like help with your recruitment advertising, don’t forget Flat Fee Recruiter will write you an attractive advert, optimise it for search engines and post it to a carefully selected mix of industry-specific and regional job boards for the flat fee cost of just £269 +vat. Get in touch with us today to see how we can transform the way you hire - simply call us on 0113 3224273 or email us at [email protected]k We have tonnes more articles on recruitment advertising that you may like, also check out:

• All you need to know about job board advertising
• All you need to know about writing job adverts
• How to proofread/write for online job boards