Posting a job listing on a freelance job board might fill your inbox with a lot of emails, but it isn’t likely to find you the best professional for the job at hand.
Locating qualified individuals to do a specific short-term job properly can be quite challenging when time might not allow you to interview them in detail, to get a feel for their grasp of the job and talk about their relevant experience.
There are some simple rules that you can follow to ensure that your company gets exactly what it is looking for when it comes to attracting professional freelancers.
Key Takeaways:
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Make sure to be specific in your ad to minimize the number of unqualified candidates you receive.
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Make your ad stand out by emphasize the benefits of working with your company.
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Make it clear how to apply and include key phrases that they must include in their phrase to eliminate anyone unqualified.
How to Write an Appealing Job Ad to Attract Professional Freelancers
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Be specific in what’s on offer. You do not want to receive 200 applications for every time you need a freelancer any more than you would want zero responses. The ideal situation is to receive the applications of a few perfectly suited individuals and then make your selection.
The way to achieve this is to be very clear on exactly what the freelance opportunity entails, what qualifications and experience you expect the applicants to have and, the specific skill(s) that will be required for the particular project. In essence, you’re creating a self-screening process, where most unqualified individuals will not even bother applying if they don’t meet the specific requirements.
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Make sure your ad stands out. A basic description of the project that’s on offer is not always the most enticing thing. If you want to attract the best professional freelancers, then you need to Spice it up a bit.
Make sure you emphasize the benefits of working with your organization even if it is purely on a project basis. Standing out and being interesting and appealing can really draw in some of the best, most creative freelancers.
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Write an engaging headline. Your headline is the first thing that potential freelancers are going to see. It needs to combine the promise of a rewarding project with a clear description of the job that you are offering, all in a few words.
They’re not going to click on the job description or read on if it sounds boring from the get-go. Make them want to – and need to – apply for your job.
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Double check and proofread. Nobody can spot all of their own mistakes, especially if you’ve been reading it over and over, so run your advert by one of your colleagues, so they can point out all of the really obvious errors in your work.
Before you post your advert make sure that at least one other person has proofread it, just in case. A job posting with spelling or other errors in it can look totally unprofessional and really take away some of the credibility of the posting itself.
There are a few editing and proofreading tools that every job listing creator should be using to improve the quality of their work. By running your adverts through these, you should instantly improve the quality and quantity of qualified freelancers applying to your listings.
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Hemingway Editor. Paste your advert into this simple online tool and it will highlight any spelling, grammatical or structural errors, using different colors to indicate your different mistakes. It can catch things that your word processing program won’t, and it’ll rate the level of readability of your text, giving it a grade level and score.
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Pro Writing Aid. If you find yourself left with the job of writing adverts yourself frequently, then this tool can make it a little easier. It can be downloaded into several word processors to pick out errors in your writing as you go, improve your readability and transform your good content into great content, so you can appeal to and attract the perfect candidates.
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Essay Writer. Once your advert is written, but before you send it out into the world, you can pass it on to a professional service for a set of trained eyes to look over. A writing service like BoomEssays can proofread your advert and make any edits that are required before you post it. All of their team members are professionals in their field so, rest assured, someone who knows their stuff will be reviewing your posting.
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Readability Score. There is no point in posting an advert if nobody can understand what you are trying to say. Pasting your advert into this tool produces a simple metric, the average reading age that would be needed to understand your writing. On the flip side, you also don’t want to post a job listing with an extremely low average reading age, when you’re seeking someone with a thorough grasp of the language. A job posting written with a low reading age rating could detract from the seriousness of the job itself, possibly deterring perfectly qualified individuals from even applying, for fear that they may be over qualified.
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Assignment Help. Sometimes time is tight, you have a whole stack of adverts to write, and you find yourself needing to hire a freelancer just to hire you freelancers! A writing service like Essay Roo can take care of all of this for you. You just send them a description of the job, and they will do everything else, passing it back to you to get posted. Each writer for Essay Roo is a qualified professional in the field they’re writing for, so the job postings will be high quality and completely relevant to the subject.
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After The Deadline. If you have no time left and you need your work proofread immediately, then there is no service quite like After The Deadline. Just paste in your advert, and it will immediately start offering you improvements and corrections. It’s an open source technology that uses artificial intelligence to seek out writing errors and offer suggestions.
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Make it clear how to apply. You don’t want a freelancer who just applies for everything without consideration. If you include a key phrase that their response must include somewhere in the description you can eliminate many time wasters, because you’ll know that the applicants – at the very least – took the time to read through the entire job description before applying.
And, if they’ve read the entire job description and still took the time to apply, there’s a higher chance they’re actually qualified.
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Try to respond to all applicants. There is nothing that puts a freelancer off applying for future projects with you more than never getting a response to their last application.
Where possible, try to reply to every applicant, regardless of how suitable they are for the role. It doesn’t have to be anything too complicated, it can just be a form email acknowledging receipt of their application, but it makes you appear professional and attentive.
Perhaps there are multiple applicants that you’re interested in, but can’t use at the moment. Simply by replying to them, you’re establishing a rapport with them, so that in the future, if there is a need for them, you’ve already opened that door for them to re-enter.
Writing an Appealing Job Ad FAQ
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How do I make my job posting more appealing?
To make your job posting more appealing to candidates, you should know what they are looking for. To do this you should make your job listing so it is categorized to active or passive job seekers. When creating ads for active job seekers, you want to make your job description compelling and make sure it incorporates the motivating factors for candidates.
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What is the first step in writing a job description?
The first step in writing a job description is to define the goals of the position. Before writing you should first ask yourself, what is the purpose of the role? What do you need to accomplish? Once you have the answer, you are able to come up with the goals for the position and any other objectives.
The job description should help guide the hiring process from start to finish so make sure you add enough to help with that.
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What are the elements of a job description?
A job description should include the job title, job purpose, job responsibilities, requirements and experience required, and the working conditions. It’s important to remember that when you are writing this job description that you add enough details so that the candidate can understand if they are qualified, but not making it too long.
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What is the most important part of a job description?
The most important part of a job description is the heading information. This information should be at the top of the job description and should include the job title, pay range, hours or shifts, and if there will be overtime or not.
Final Thoughts
It isn’t easy crafting the right advert to get someone perfectly suited to the role you have in mind. But, if you can perfect that fine art then you will be an asset to your company, able to attract the very best of the freelancing crop.
Author
Jenn Steele
Jen Steele is a dynamic, results-driven leader with over two decades of experience in the technology and marketing industries. As the CEO of KissMetrics, Jen is responsible for driving the company's strategic direction, growth, and overall success.
