Smart Tools to Upgrade Your Job Ads and Boost Conversions | HIRECONOMICS #6

Job posts are an essential part of an employer brand and can highly influence candidates’ engagement.

There are lots of rules, dos and don’ts but the magical recipe to write a perfect job ad doesn’t exist.

However, thanks to language processing technologies recruiters have an opportunity to get data-backed recommendations for improving job ads and other written content.

Let’s have a look at three useful tools for analyzing and improving job posts.

Check readability with Hemingway Editor

The first tool, Hemingway Editor evaluates a readability of your text. The best readability score is between 6th to 8th grade. Higher readability means the text is too hard to read.

You simply insert your text into a text box at hemigwayapp.com and see the result. You can also use a desktop version (which is paid but has more features). As you see app shows stats like reading time and readability issues: highlights sentences which are hard to read, suggests to get rid of passive voice and adverbs and indicates the words or phrases which have a simpler alternative. A very handy tool with the simple and clear interface.

Augment your writing with Textio

Let’s have a brief look at the more complex tool - Augmented writing platform Textio. It’s not free but has 14-days trial.

Textio predicts the hiring success of the job posting comparing it to similar job ads in a given location. The app suggests a replacement of word/phrase to change the impact of the text. It also shows gender tone, corporate clichés and gives useful recommendations. 

Evaluate your job page with Job Page Grader

The last tool, Job page grader powered by Ph.Creative is using an URL to your job posting and provides complex insights to engagement, conversion, performance and SEO of your ad. This tool is focused much more on the technical side of the job ad as marketing content rather than purely text itself.

This tool is free and provides a quite detailed score. Engagement metrics here include sentiment, usability, practicality and gender bias score. Criteria, however, are quite strict. For example, for high practicality score, you should have a video or integration with Dropbox at your job ad page, but some job boards don’t allow that. So take the results with a grain of salt using the general recommendations and adapt it to your technical and industry specifics. This tool is quite interesting in terms of SEO metrics, analyzing the technical aspects such as metadata, schema vocabulary, mobile optimization etc.

Bear in mind that those tools only work efficiently for content in English. For other languages, it might work (depending on the tool) but not accurate.

You can try other similar tools like Atomic reach, Headline analyzer, cliché finder but also do your own analysis of job posts which were successful in the past and use the best out of it (style, visuals, phrases etc).

Mentioned tools can be extremely helpful, but as with anything else use common sense and think about the target audience when editing your job ad accordingly. And, of course, be creative.

Happy Hunting (and job posts writing)!