Does Your Engineering Job Advert Actually Sell the Job?

We read a lot of engineering job descriptions. Some are excellent, some look as though they were written ten years ago, saved somewhere on the company server and dragged out every time somebody leaves, and some are essentially a shopping list. You must have this qualification, you must have that experience, you will be responsible for this and you will be expected to do that. Then, right at the bottom, perhaps there are two lines explaining why anybody might actually want the job.

That approach might have worked when employers could reasonably assume there would be a queue of suitably qualified applicants waiting to apply. In many of the specialist engineering markets we recruit within, that simply isn’t the reality anymore. If you are trying to attract an experienced engineer who already has a perfectly good job, the vacancy needs to do considerably more than tell them what you expect from them.

You’re Advertising to People Who May Not Need a New Job

This is the bit that is sometimes forgotten. A good engineer reading your vacancy may already be employed and may not be actively looking to leave. Perhaps they’ve seen the advert on LinkedIn, maybe we’ve approached them about the role or something has simply made them curious enough to take a look. At that point, your job description has a job of its own to do. It needs to make them think “that sounds interesting”, rather than simply “yes, I appear to meet the requirements”.

That distinction becomes even more important when the skills you are looking for are scarce. If somebody has several potential opportunities available to them, the employer who actually explains why their job is interesting has an obvious advantage over the employer who provides three pages of responsibilities and finishes with “competitive salary and company pension”.

Tell Them What They Will Actually Be Doing

Engineers tend to want to know about the engineering. What are they designing? What are they building? What problems will they be solving? What technology will they be working with? What stage is the project at and who will they be working alongside? These things can be far more interesting than another paragraph telling them they need “excellent communication skills and the ability to work independently or as part of a team”. Most experienced candidates will assume you’re looking for those things anyway.

If you’re developing an interesting new product, working with unusual technology, building something at the limits of current performance or solving a particularly difficult engineering problem, say so. There may be commercially sensitive details that you obviously can’t put into an advert, but there is usually considerably more that can be said than many employers realise.

Explain Why the Vacancy Exists

Context can also make a surprisingly big difference. Is the company growing? Have you won a new programme? Are you developing a new product, increasing production or expanding into another market? Perhaps the vacancy exists because the previous job holder has been promoted internally. All of those things tell a candidate something about the business they might potentially be joining.

“Quality Engineer required” tells them very little. “We’ve just won a major new programme and are expanding the quality team to support it” immediately gives the vacancy a story. The responsibilities may ultimately be identical, but the second version gives somebody a reason to want to know more.

Don’t Hide Everything Until the Interview

Salary is the obvious example. We still see adverts offering a “competitive salary” when candidates increasingly want to know whether it’s worth investing their time in an application or interview before they begin the process. The same applies to location, working hours, flexibility and travel requirements. If somebody discovers at second interview that the role requires three days a week away from home, you haven’t protected the recruitment process by withholding that information — you’ve probably just wasted everybody’s time.

At ASL Technical, part of our job is making sure candidates understand the opportunity before they meet our client, and that means we need enough information to sell it properly. Recruitment is, after all, a two-way sales process. The employer is assessing the candidate, but the candidate is also assessing the employer.

Final Thought

A job advert shouldn’t simply describe the person you want; it should explain why the person you want might want you. In a specialist engineering market, that distinction matters enormously. Before you publish your next vacancy, read it again from the candidate’s side of the desk and ask yourself a very simple question: if you already had a reasonably good job, would this advert make you interested enough to have a conversation?




Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

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Does Your Engineering Job Advert Actually Sell the Job?
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Co-Founder & Director