Content for attracting employees: a careers page and clear job adverts

Employer branding sounds like something for corporate budgets, but in practice it means something simple: what a person finds out about your company before sending their CV. If they find out nothing, they assume the worst or apply somewhere else.

A good candidate behaves like a careful buyer: they search for the company on Google, look at the careers page and at what former employees write. The content we produce gives honest answers to the questions they do not ask at interview: what an ordinary day is like, who their boss will be, how much work there really is.

The advert with an “attractive salary” and the silence that follows

The company needs people and publishes an advert copied from someone else: “dynamic environment”, “attractive salary package”, “young team”. The careers section on the website is an email address. Few applications come in, many of them unsuitable.

It is worse when the advert promises something other than what the person finds: the new colleague leaves after a few weeks and recruitment starts again from scratch. Recruitment content has two jobs: to attract the right people and to make it clear to the rest that this is not the place for them.

The careers page: what a candidate looks for before applying

We build it like a sales page, where the “product” is the job. Every open position has its own page, easy to pass on and to find on Google, and filled positions are closed rather than left hanging for years.

We write the part about a working day after talking to the people in that team, not just to the director: the real hours, the tools, who shows you what to do in your first week.

• Open positions: each with its own description, date and up-to-date status.
• A working day: hours, shifts, tools, who you work with.
• The terms: type of contract, place of work, working from home or on site, the benefits actually on offer.
• Selection: how many stages it has, who calls you and how you find out the answer.
• The form: short, easy to fill in on a phone, with the privacy notice.

Real colleagues, with their written consent

No actors and no stock photos. Real colleagues appear, but only those who want to. Nobody is put in the position of refusing in front of the boss: we ask separately, and a “no” is accepted without explanations.

The consent is written and says where the material appears: website, social networks, paid adverts. Our rule is that the material is withdrawn on request, including after the person leaves the company. Check the wording with your data protection officer.

We do not put words in anyone’s mouth. We do an interview and quote what the person says, including the harder parts of the job: the night shift, the cold on the factory floor, the peak months.

Clear job adverts and a reply for every candidate

The advert’s title is the name of the job as people search for it. The text says what you actually do in a week, what you must already know and what is learned on the job, where the work is done and on what schedule. Check the rules on pay transparency and non-discriminatory wording with your HR specialist or your lawyer.

Then comes the part many companies forget: the reply. Every application gets an automatic confirmation, which says when and how they will hear back, and those who are rejected find out too, through a short message. CVs are personal data: how long you keep them is something you settle with your data protection officer.

Employer branding without promises the company does not keep

The writing rule is simple: we write nothing that someone hired yesterday could contradict. Content does not fix a below-market salary or a boss nobody can work with.

Technically, the positions are a separate content type in WordPress, easy for the HR person to add and to close. Each advert can carry JobPosting structured data, markup through which search engines understand the position, the location and the date. Google’s special display for job listings exists only in certain countries, so we check at the time of the project whether the markup has any effect in Romania. In Google Analytics 4 we track where candidates come from and judge by suitable applications, not by their number.

A few phrases we take out of the text whenever there is nothing behind them:

• “We are a family”: better to say how a day off requested at short notice is handled.
• Chances of promotion, where nobody has ever been promoted.
• Flexible hours, when that really means overtime.
• Photos from a single party, presented as everyday life.

This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.