A graphic illustration: getting the best from recruitment ads

The right advertisement in the right place can produce an impressive field of candidates, but, mishandled, advertising can be a fruitless waste of money. Our panel of creative experts share the ingredients for a successful recruitment advertisement.

Learning Points Carrying out initial research into the profile of the recruiter's intended audience, as well as internally into current employees' perceptions of their employer, is a prerequisite for a successful recruitment advertising campaign. The most effective job advertisements are arresting and reach out to the target audience, thereby attracting the most suitable pool of candidates for the post. Many recruitment advertising and marketing agencies now offer a more diverse range of services than designing and placing job advertisements, from building a new employer brand to employee communications. Recruitment advertising is one of the main areas where discrimination can slip into the recruitment and selection process, and it is vital that recruiters take care not to contravene anti-discrimination legislation. Job advertisements can also provide the scope to promote an employer's diversity programme and encourage interest from under-represented groups.

Recruitment advertising, in its traditional print media format, continues to be by far the most popular method of sourcing applicants.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has just published its 2004 annual recruitment, retention and turnover survey¹ and the findings confirm this trend. Local newspaper adverts top the chart, with 87% of employers opting for this approach, while 75% advertise vacancies in specialist journals and/or the trade press.

And yet, despite the familiarity that most employers must have with this recruitment technique, and the considerable proportion of HR budgets that must be ploughed into it, there is a surprisingly thin body of research into its effectiveness. There is also considerable controversy about what constitutes an effective recruitment advert.

This article attempts to delve beneath the glossy surface of recruitment advertising and evaluate some of the key factors that can help attract a high quality pool of candidates. It also examines the contribution that advertising agencies can make to the process and considers how the client/agency relationship should be managed.

What's in an advertisement?

Put simply, a recruitment advertisement is an open invitation to apply for a vacancy. Much of the debate surrounding this ever-popular recruitment tool centres on the style and content of job adverts and what design techniques are most appropriate to engage the target audience. At the risk of fudging the issue, the consensus from our panel of creative experts interviewed for this article is that there is no one best approach on the question of overall design.

Whether big and bold or subtle and minimalist, the advertisement must be arresting and catch the attention of those individuals who are most likely to fit the job's profile. To do this, the graphics, text and overall style of the recruitment advert must hit home hard with its central message.

Whatever the final decision about the creative side of an advertisement's design, there remain two clear abiding principles. First, the advert must abide with the requirements of the law. And, second, it should be based on the needs of the organisation, the type of job being advertised and the labour market from which the candidates are likely to be sourced.

Doing the groundwork

Mark Rice is co-founder and creative partner of communications agency "and advertising". In his view, it is vital that the agency and client organisation do their homework before undertaking any creative work for a recruitment advertising campaign.

"Research needs to be undertaken not only into the client organisation's potential contact audience, but also internally into the perceptions of existing employees," he explains. "Otherwise, there is a risk that the messages that the recruiting company portrays to the outside world about the employment opportunities or working culture, for example, could be out of sync with the experience of people already working there."

According to Neil Griffiths, creative director at Bernard Hodes and panel judge for this year's Recruitment Advertising Awards (RADs), the preparation that both client organisation and agency undertake before looking to develop an idea is a prerequisite for an effective recruitment advertisement or campaign.

"The brief that the agency is given by the client is vital," he says. "The employer needs to have prepared relevant information and should come to the briefing with a clear idea of what to feed into the creative process. This will usually involve talking to the line manager responsible for the vacant post to determine what is the strong selling point. When the agency's creative team is given clear and concise information by the client, it is easier to come up with a really strong idea to sell that role to the appropriate audience."

Design principles

In Mark Rice's view, the key criterion for an effective recruitment advertisement is whether or not the advert gets the right message across to potential candidates.

"There is a lot of superficiality within the industry, with the mistaken assumption that the glossier the advertisement, the more effective it is," Rice says. "Yes, client organisations are under pressure to be more stringent with their budgets in the current climate, but that is no excuse for unexciting work. In fact, it poses more of a challenge. Not having the resources for a full-page colour ad does not mean an advertisement can't have a big impact. It is not size that's important, it is what you are trying to achieve - even if it's on the back of a matchbox."

The work carried out by "and advertising" for Levi Strauss (see illustration below) has brought the agency several accolades, including the top prize in the "sales, media, creative and marketing" category of this year's RADs. The instantly recognisable red Levi's jeans label on the advert means that a quick glance is enough to know who is behind the advertising, although there is not a pair of jeans in sight.

As Mark Rice explains, the campaign revolves around a carefully crafted theme to reach the right pool of potential candidates.

"The whole design of the Levi's adverts, with their 'careers beyond cool' strapline, reflects big change at the company from a wholesaler to a retailer. The recruitment ads carry the important message that Levi's are not just a trendy jeans retailer, even though the clothes carry a trendy label. People working for the company can have a long-term career there. The ads are also a bit edgy, a bit different, as they aim to appeal to people who will suit the working culture and de-select those potential applicants who would not fit in."

The theme for the ongoing recruitment campaign at Levi Strauss has now been running for around two years and has proved very successful in terms of reaching its intended audience and bringing forward a quality field of candidates.

Mark Rice's advice when a campaign is proving to be so effective is to stick with it. "I have come across so many situations where a recruiter or agency feels it is necessary to alter the theme just because it has been running for a while - but, if it is working, don't change it."

According to Neil Griffiths, of Bernard Hodes's, the underlying principle behind a good recruitment ad is simple: it has to have a good idea behind it. "It's very easy to put an advertisement out there with the job title and logo on it, but if it does not contain a promise or potential benefit for a jobseeker, it is a lost opportunity. There has to be a unique selling proposition," says Griffiths.

In his view, the "idea" will then dictate how the ad will be created, in terms of the choice of imagery and typeface used. This will then help to sell that idea to the right people. "There is no set rule when it comes to the look and feel of a layout," Griffiths explains. "It could be a single word or a huge image but it must be done in an entertaining and engaging way that appeals to the target audience."

As an example, he cites a recruitment advert that Bernard Hodes produced for one of its clients, British Airways (see illustration below). The advertised vacancy was in IT and the key message was that the new starter would have the opportunity to be involved in big projects straight away. Instead of spelling this out literally in the ad, the visual image used was a tray of coffee cups, asking potential candidates if they wouldn't rather be involved in more exciting work from day one. The design concept, therefore, enhanced the central message of the recruitment brief for that vacancy and gave it greater impact.

"The essence of an effective recruitment ad is that it attracts suitable job candidates," says Paul Turner of Barkers recruitment advertising agency, the winner of numerous recruitment advertising awards. "Any amount of creativity is wasted if it does not hit the right audience." The agency triumphed in the "central government and government agencies" category of this year's RADs for its "very powerful" recruitment advertising campaign to attract greater numbers of female prison officers to work for HM Prison Service.

The campaign used a multi-media approach and included ads on local radio and print media. "The work of a prison officer revolves around rehabilitation rather than punishment and, therefore, the ability to empathise with prisoners and build supportive relationships is paramount," Paul Turner explains. "We built the campaign around the idea of empathising with female prisoners' backgrounds and personal circumstances. And we wove around it certain statistics designed to make our target audience really think about who ends up in prison, why they're there and how it feels."

The result was a series of thought-provoking recruitment ads with various facts about female prisoners depicted by hard-hitting graphics and the strapline: "Can you imagine how that feels?" For example, one job ad leads with the statistic that 60% of women in prison are mothers and informs readers that "many women prisoners say that the pain of separation from their kids is the hardest part of being inside". Snapshots of a baby and small children help to convey the same poignant message (see illustrations below).

A touch of reality

One important consideration involves the amount of detail included about the job and the organisation. Recruitment and retention expert Stephen Taylor, in his CIPD resourcing handbook², advises that self-selection on the part of potential candidates is the key aim when the employer wishes to reach a narrowly defined target audience. This means featuring "less razzmatazz" and more detailed information about the job and the kind of candidate sought.

In what must be one of the largest research exercises of its kind, more than 9,000 recruitment advertisements published in a single month were analysed to identify the key factors that contribute to a successful job advertisement. The study, conducted in 2000 for Focus Central London Training and Enterprise Council³, investigated the amount of detail contained in each advert based on the number of skills required by the vacancy.

The research team then surveyed employers to see how successful they had been in recruiting someone who met the criteria for the job. The findings established that: "Employers who 'invested' more money in the advertisement by specifying a greater number of skills tend to receive more applications for the job, and are more likely to have obtained all the skills, qualifications and experience that they require."

In the view of Paul Turner of the Barkers agency, it is important that recruitment ads carry core information about the vacancy. "The research shows that there are three key pieces of data that jobseekers value - who they will be working for, where they will be working and how much they will be earning. It is important that this information is included, not just to encourage a greater level of interest in the vacancy, but to act as a filter mechanism, so that those people who are not prepared to work below a certain salary level, for example, self-select."

This view is borne out by the recruitment adverts that Barkers has designed and placed for HM Prison Service. The text at the bottom of all the ads in the series makes reference to salary level, pension arrangements, career prospects and prison location, as well as some of the attitudes or competencies required for the job.

Neil Griffiths of Bernard Hodes stresses the importance of ensuring that each advert includes a unique selling point. Following on from this, he is sceptical about the need for large amounts of information about the vacancy itself. "Including lots of detail about what the job entails isn't always going to engage people as they probably already know what the job is all about," he says. "There needs to be a direct sell about what the company can offer the candidate if they join."

A possible compromise here is to provide enough hard data about the role to pique a jobseeker's interest and direct them to a website where they may glean further information. Interested jobseekers for the HM Prison Service posts, for example, are invited to either contact the organisation by telephone or visit a dedicated website address.

Another conundrum for recruiters is how to communicate the vacancy. According to resourcing expert Stephen Taylor, one option is to use an "unashamedly positive approach" and downplay the less attractive aspects of the job. While it is often tempting to do so, and portray the vacancy and organisation in as an optimistic fashion as possible, this may not be in the employer's best long-term interest.

Neil Griffiths is clear that the vision of employment projected in any recruitment advertising has to be realistic: "If a candidate's expectations from the recruitment advertisement do not live up to the recruitment and employment experience, they will have been sold a false promise, and the employer could have a retention issue."

Paul Turner also believes that recruitment ads should be truthful: "The cost of replacing someone who has joined the organisation under false pretences on the part of the recruiter is far greater than recruiting them in the first place."

To brand or not to brand?

Employer branding is a relatively young concept that has become influential in today's increasingly competitive jobs market. Just as a consumer brand aims to engender a favourable and enduring association with specific goods or services, so too does an employer brand aspire to create a positive connotation to attract jobseekers and retain existing members of staff.

Bernard Hodes's Neil Griffiths points out that employer branding has become an increasingly important part of employer marketing, particularly where there is no obvious differentiation in what one organisation can offer potential recruits compared with its competitors.

He also refers to the importance of not confusing an organisation's consumer brand with its employment brand. "The distinction between a consumer brand and an employer proposition is becoming increasingly blurred. Creating brands based on the people who work for an organisation is crucial; some masterbrands have been built without even consulting their employees, which is madness."

Recent work that Bernard Hodes has done for some clients, such as Orange and the BBC, includes developing awareness campaigns to raise the profile of these organisations' employer brands in the job marketplace.

The Orange campaign, for example, centres on communicating to people that Orange is not just a mobile phone company. Advertisements featured in national newspapers, therefore, do not advertise specific job vacancies, but show the diverse range of employment opportunities on offer. "For the passive candidate glancing through the paper, the seed will be planted," Neil Griffiths says. "The image of Orange as an employer will grow with each further ad in a drip-drip effect and, eventually, that could result in the person being motivated to visit the careers website or respond to a specific job ad."

Mark Rice also points out that a consumer brand and an employer brand are very different concepts. Despite this, he says that it is common practice for recruiters to mistakenly think they can recruit on the strength of their reputation in the consumer marketplace, when they may have no such reputation in the jobs market.

"What these employers are doing is selling the brand dream rather than the employment dream," Mark Rice says. "A consumer brand is about selling a product or service and a strong one will not be a hindrance to attracting interest, but that does not mean that the recruitment work is attracting the right target audience. To do that, the ad needs to reflect the consumer brand but also communicate the employment experience to the appropriate pool of people."

On one level, promoting the employer brand - if the organisation is fortunate enough to have developed a good one - in its recruitment advertising is considered to do the recruiter no harm. However, some experts advise that there is justification in focusing on other aspects of employment when sourcing candidates through a recruitment ad or campaign. It is also certainly worth the recruiter, or the agency on its behalf, carrying out some preliminary research into perceptions of the employer brand. They may not quite live up to the favourable image that the employer imagines exists.

According to Mark Rice, the employer brand is often reduced to a strapline in recruitment advertising, with no clear communication about what it is like to work for the recruiting company: "An ad must say something relevant to the target audience about the role and culture of the organisation."

An example is the employer branding work that the "and advertising" agency has begun for café retail chain EAT, which prides itself on being a "real food company". The recruitment material focuses on the aspirations of people who join EAT. EAT's culture is inclusive and this message is communicated in its recruitment advertising (see illustration below).

Routes to market

With the expansion of new technology, the recruiting organisation's choice of advertising media has become less straightforward. No longer is it primarily a simple choice between placing the ad in a local newspaper or going national. There are now the additional options - and potential benefits - of using the various online channels, such as job boards (internet sites that specialise in hosting recruitment advertisements from a range of employers) and corporate websites set up by individual employers themselves.

However, the previously-mentioned recruitment and retention survey from the CIPD has found that the use of electronic recruitment methods is not as common as offline alternatives. The most frequently used method consists of advertising vacancies on corporate websites, a technique that 72% of organisations employ. In other words, almost three in 10 employers make no use of any form of online recruitment whatsoever.

Although acknowledging that internet usage is undoubtedly on the rise among many jobseekers, Mark Rice cautions that, in some cases, potential applicants are not searching the net for vacancies: "It's important that employers think carefully about the profile of the particular groups of people they are trying to attract. There is still a huge offline market. For example, 'and advertising' has one client who wants to attract older workers who may not be surfing the web, but are more likely to be reached through more traditional print media."

The three main options for press advertising remain the same as they have been for a long time: national broadsheets, such as the Guardian and The Times, local newspapers and professional/trade publications. The first option is easily the most pricey - costing up to £17,000 for a very modestly-sized job advert in the Guardian newspaper. Clearly, national advertising for a vacancy can only be justified when the seniority or specialism associated with the post justifies the financial outlay.

According to Neil Griffiths of Bernard Hodes, a recruitment advertising campaign should use whatever media channels are necessary to ensure that the message is communicated to the intended job pool.

Bernard Hodes has recently developed a campaign to attract young people and graduates for Tesco and is using a multimedia approach, as befits the target audience. As well as posters and other print media channels, the "urban and surfy" imagery used in this campaign is continued on the retailer's corporate website. Games are used to appeal to and engage this younger generation of jobseekers (see illustration below).

Calling in the professionals

Selecting and using recruitment advertising agencies could form the basis of an entirely separate article, but it is worth highlighting some of the key issues here.

The first point to note is that the majority of agencies now offer a much wider range of services than merely designing and placing job ads, and ranges from employer branding to employee communications.

Second, it may be a misconception to believe that contracting out work to a recruitment marketing consultancy will necessarily cost a considerable amount of money. Because of their position in the marketplace, advertising agencies have much greater bargaining power, and can purchase advertising space at considerably reduced prices, which may enable them to pass on this saving to their clients.

Granted, a high-profile recruitment advertising campaign developed by one of the top agencies is likely to demand a significant financial investment on the part of a client organisation, but agencies are available to carry out work at the far less glamorous end of the spectrum. At the same time, the recruiter potentially stands to gain from the creativity and expert knowledge of the media, a resource that very few organisations can boast that they possess in-house.

The same advice for choosing a consultancy or external supplier applies to selecting the most appropriate recruitment advertising agency for an organisation's needs. This includes consideration of the agency's track record and level of repeat business, as well as a clear evaluation of what it is the recruiter needs from the agency. Reed Business Information (part of the same group as IRS) launched a free website in 2003 to help HR and recruitment professionals select recruitment advertising and marketing agencies, and understand them better (www.recruitment-marketing.co.uk/).

A familiar part of the selection process consists of the so-called "beauty parade", where a number of agencies pitch for an account by showing mocked-up design concepts to the prospective client. This method demands a considerable investment of time and resources on the part of both client and agency, and some in the advertising industry are doubtful that it provides an in-depth view of the agency's strengths and culture. Neither, they argue, does it give much of an indication of how productive the working relationship between agency and client organisation will be, a factor that many involved in such an arrangement say is pivotal to any recruitment marketing strategy.

The advice that Neil Griffiths offers employers on selecting the right agency is to do their research.

"I would encourage any client to start with a consideration of which agencies had the potential to fit with its own culture, goals and values. This in itself should produce a shortlist. It is also vital that the client organisation thinks carefully about what it wants from the agency in terms of the services it can provide and the sort of working relationship. HR professionals are the key to the ongoing relationship and, for the most effective results, it should be a collaboration based on trust, with both parties prepared to challenge each other, and with the agency viewed as an extension of the HR team."

Avoiding discrimination . . .

It is ironic that, on the face of it, recruitment advertising represents one of the most open approaches for attracting applicants while, at the same time, being the recruitment method that faces one of the greatest risks of contravening anti-discrimination legislation.

According to David Harper, a partner with the international law firm Lovells, the other main legal strand affecting recruitment advertising is its potential link to the employment contract.

He explains: "Ordinarily, a job ad does not form part of the contractual arrangement between employer and employee, but it is possible that an employee who believes that their job does not match up to what was offered in the advert can make a claim of misrepresentation. It is, therefore, important that a recruitment ad does not make any false promises."

Job adverts are also covered by the British Code of Advertising, which stipulates that they must not be illegal, misleading or dishonest. There must also be a genuine vacancy and any disclosed salary details must be accurate.

It is essential that recruiters adhere to equal opportunities legislation in the use of recruitment advertising. With the additional anti-discrimination legislation that has recently been introduced, this means avoiding direct or indirect discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, disability, sexual orientation and religion or beliefs.

"Direct discrimination occurs if an advert invites men only to apply for a vacancy, for example," explains David Harper. "Indirect discrimination would not be as blatant, but if an ad outlined a specific set of qualities that candidates would need to possess, for instance, in practice this could sideline specific groups of people." Although not yet law, many employers also follow best practice guidance and avoid placing ageist recruitment ads.

Most organisations are now familiar with the more overt manifestations of discrimination that can occur in job advertising, including the need to use neutral job titles such as "firefighter" instead of "fireman". But guidance produced by the Equal Opportunities Commission⁴ (EOC) makes the important point that "each individual advertisement needs to be considered as a whole, in terms of the job advertised, the words used in the job description and the message that the advertiser is attempting to portray through the addition of an illustration." [emphasis added]

This means that discrimination can creep into the process through more than just the language used, and David Harper echoes this point when he comments that any illustration or graphic reproduced in the ad represents potential pitfalls into which the recruiter can fall.

"The choice of image should not convey any bias or expectation on the part of the recruiter," he says. "They should also be careful not to contain any stereotypical images."

This is a murky area and, to assess whether a picture or photograph could be incompatible with the law, it is necessary to consider the overall impact of the job ad, as the advice from the EOC quoted above makes clear.

The EOC provides some useful examples that show that the same image could be construed as discriminatory in one recruitment ad, and be perfectly acceptable in another. For example, an advertisement for a general manager of a "theme" pub showing a man playing a saxophone may not be unlawful. However, an advertisement for a session musician showing the same illustration may indicate an intention to discriminate. In the latter example, the image could be directly related to the actual job whereas, in the previous example, the illustration is reflecting the theme of the pub.

The Commission for Racial Equality has also produced guidance to help employers avoid using discriminatory job advertisements⁵.

David Harper advises that a statement included in a job advert to the effect that applications are welcome from all individuals, regardless of race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion, religious belief, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, disability and age could help employers defend any potential discrimination claims. An abbreviated version could simply state that the organisation is an equal opportunities employer.

. . . and encouraging diversity

Recruitment advertising can go further than merely taking care not to contravene anti-discrimination legislation and equal opportunities guidelines, however. There is also scope to promote an employer's diversity programme and encourage applications from heavily under-represented sections of the community.

Findings from the CIPD's recruitment survey, referred to earlier, show that three in 10 (29%) employers advertise vacancies beyond traditional media to target under-represented groups, while one in four (25%) use specific images and/or words within job ads to target such groups.

The Barkers agency employs its own in-house diversity team and takes the question of equal opportunities seriously. "Of course, we don't want to fall foul of the legislation, but it's also about encouraging best practice and working with our client organisations so that they do the same," says Paul Turner. "Our head of diversity sends out a monthly newsletter to keep everyone up to date on equal opportunities and diversity issues, such as new legislation and upcoming religious festivals. She also advises creative staff on what is acceptable legally and how job advertisements can be tailored to attract certain under-represented groups."

Barkers' recent recruitment advertising campaign referred to earlier represents a prime example of how applications from a particular group were encouraged - in this case, from women. "The Prison Service was very short of prison officers in 10 female prisons across England," explains Turner. "It wasn't possible for the Prison Service to advertise for women only, so we needed to make sure our recruitment material struck a distinctly feminine chord." The approach proved very successful. With 150 vacancies to fill, the campaign generated more than 3,500 responses. The breakdown of callers requesting application packs was 28% male and 72% female.

Monitoring effectiveness

A recruitment advertisement can only be deemed effective if it is sufficiently arresting and carries the right message to reach its audience. As with any recruitment and selection technique, recruitment advertising needs to be monitored to assess its effectiveness.

The most basic analysis would be to calculate the number of applications that were generated by a particular job ad. This is a very simple task, as most recruiters are well aware, and involves asking applicants to quote a job reference number when responding to an ad. It is also a very crude approach, however, as the data tells the recruiter nothing about the quality of the applicants coming forward.

Conducting an analysis of the candidates who have been shortlisted for appointment by the recruitment channel they used will provide the organisation with a quality-based measurement method.

Taking this approach a step further, employers could undertake a monitoring exercise to establish which method produced the successful candidate. If this activity were to be carried out over a period of time, it would be possible to determine whether a particular technique was consistently producing the strongest field of quality candidates, and which medium or source was involved.

1.Recruitment, retention and turnover 2004, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2004, available free from www.cipd.co.uk.

2.Employee resourcing, Stephen Taylor, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 1998.

3.Skill needs and recruitment practices in central London, Mark Spilsbury and Karen Lane, Focus Central London Training and Enterprise Council, 2000.

4.Illustrated advertisements, Equal Opportunities Commission, www.eoc.org.uk.

5.Job advertisements and the Race Relations Act, Commission for Racial Equality, 1994, http://www.cre.gov.uk.

This article was written by Rachel Suff, a freelance employment researcher and writer, rmsuff@dsl.pipex.com.