How to Optimize a Marketing Job Posting: The Critical First Five Lines of a Marketing Job Post

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How do you formulate a persuasive message in a job posting for a marketing position?

Use the first five lines of your marketing job post to provide a succinct, hard-hitting summary of your vacancy’s value proposition.  That summary must include four elements of information that form the acronym JECC.  It stands for: Job, Employer, Compensation, and Confidentiality.

Let’s look briefly at each of them.

An Introduction for Passive, High Caliber Marketing Talent

The order of the four essential elements that must be present in the first five lines of a marketing job posting is just as important as their content.  Talented marketers often don’t look for a job, even when they are in transition.  They look for situations that will challenge them to excel and, as a result, promote their continued success.

For that reason, a marketing job posting should always lead with a description of both the job and the employer.  Each is insufficient in and of itself to motivate most passive candidates, but taken together, they form a powerful expression of the work, culture and values that will enable the right person to advance in their career.

The third element of the first five lines describes the compensation offered by the job, expressed in numbers.  Top talent doesn’t go to work for the money, but they use their salary to measure their progress in advancing their career.  You can express a job’s compensation in a range to preserve your negotiating position, but avoid such meaningless phrases as “competitive salary” or “salary based on experience.”  They’re ad breakers for the best candidates.  Those individuals want to know – right up front and in quantitative terms – whether your opening offers them a financial step forward.

And finally, the last of the four elements in the first five lines is a statement expressing your organization’s commitment to protecting candidate confidentiality.  The best talent is almost always employed so they have something to lose if their interest in your position becomes public.  For that reason, it’s important to signal not only that you understand their need for privacy but that you take responsibility for safe-guarding it.

The Golden Rule of Recruiting is as simple as it is profound: What you do to recruit the best talent will also recruit mediocre talent, but the converse is not true.  For that reason, it’s critical that you write your job postings so passive, high caliber talent will be compelled to read them.  Use the first five lines of each ad to describe what’s in it for them.

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