What Makes a Job Ad Effective
An effective job ad is not just well-written – it is engineered to be found and to convert. As Get-Optimal Founder and CEO Daniel Fellows puts it, “Job ads are 90% science and 10% art. It needs to be well-written, but unless you’ve got these key data points optimized, it’s just a great job ad that ultimately no one’s going to see.” The strongest ads pair a searchable title, a short and scannable body, salary transparency, and inclusive language with a fast apply experience.
What makes a job ad effective:
- A clear, searchable job title of four to six words that candidates actually type into search.
- Salary or pay range shown up front to build trust and self-select qualified applicants.
- A short role summary of one to four sentences, followed by scannable bullet points.
- Inclusive, bias-free language that widens the applicant pool.
- A mobile-friendly, low-friction apply flow that takes minutes, not tens of minutes.
- Optimization for the job boards and search engines where candidates look.
Why Most Employers Get Job Ads Wrong
The job ad is the single most-viewed piece of content a recruiter owns. As Joveo VP of Strategic Initiatives Jenn Terry notes, “The data shows that people are looking at your job advertisements more than any other single piece of content.” Yet most ads are written for the hiring manager, not the candidate, and never surface in search.
Get-Optimal built what Daniel Fellows describes as “a 40-odd point algorithm” designed to “enable a 30% increase in the performance of that job ad.” In practice, that means treating each ad as a data object with dozens of measurable signals rather than a block of prose. The gap between a good-sounding ad and a high-performing one is almost entirely in those signals.
The Data Points That Drive Job Ad Performance
Third-party benchmarks line up closely with the science-first view. The table below summarizes the content signals that most affect apply rates.
Writing for Diversity and Inclusion
Inclusive language is a performance lever, not only a compliance one. In the original Talent Talks conversation, Get-Optimal reported a 22% increase in female applications from a gender-decoding tool, alongside a 77% increase in quality candidates for its largest client in a single quarter and an average rejection rate north of 85% at Indeed before optimization.
Common exclusionary terms flagged in current guidance include “digital native,” “culture fit,” “he/she,” “blacklisting,” and “recent graduates.” Replacing biased phrasing – for example, swapping “brown bag sessions” for “lunch and learns” – widens the funnel without changing the role. For a fast first draft that avoids these traps, teams can start with Joveo’s job title generator and refine the body from there.
Optimizing Job Ads for Job Boards and Search Engines
An ad that reads well but is not structured for discovery still fails. Concise, exact-match titles outperform long or creative ones, and remote or hybrid labels – while less of a magnet than they were from 2021 to 2023 – still act as useful clarity signals. Timing matters too: nearly 20% of applications land on Monday, and more than half of all applications arrive within the first 10 days of a posting.
Getting the same ad to perform across Indeed, Google, and niche boards is a distribution problem as much as a copywriting one. Joveo’s guide to programmatic job advertising explains how to route optimized ads to the sources that convert, and the ultimate guide to career sites covers the on-site experience that captures the click.
Optimizing Job Ads at Scale
Writing one great ad is manageable; writing thousands consistently is not. This is where the “90% science” framing pays off: when quality is defined by measurable data points, it can be automated and audited across an entire req load rather than left to individual writers. Standardizing titles, salary display, structure, and language lets large employers hold quality steady while volume grows. Unfamiliar with a term in this space? The recruitment marketing glossary is a useful reference.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a job ad be?
Keep the role summary to one to four sentences and use bullet points for a little less than a quarter (about 25%) of the ad. Aim for sentences of 13 to 18 words so the ad stays scannable on mobile.
Does listing salary really improve applications?
Yes. In a LinkedIn survey, 91% of applicants said seeing a salary range would affect their decision to apply, and 16 US states now legally require pay disclosure. Pay is among the most decisive factors candidates weigh.
What is the ideal job title length?
Titles of four to six words deliver the strongest apply rates, and about 36% of job seekers search using the exact title of the role. Apply rates fall once a title runs longer than 10 words.
How does inclusive language affect job ad performance?
Removing biased or exclusionary terms widens the applicant pool. Get-Optimal reported a 22% increase in female applications after applying a gender-decoding tool to job ads.
How fast should the application process be?
Application flows of one to five minutes significantly outperform those that take 10 or more minutes. Defer cover letters and assessments to later screening stages to protect apply rates.
How to Optimize Job Ads: The Most Important Content Asset for Recruiters
Jenn: For those listening / watching that haven’t met you before, can you tell us just a little bit about your background, and a little bit about Get-Optimal?
Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. I’m the founder of Get-Optimal. We launched in September 2019 in London and we are a job ad optimization platform. From my time at Indeed and now at Get-Optimal, we know a great deal about the problem and the global challenges we’re solving with Job Ads.
My background… I suppose I’m just obsessed with technology and solving problems. As a marketer in my previous roles, I use that level of empathy to help people get through big challenges. Recently, in the last two or three years, I’ve become completely obsessed with job ads. It’s a burning desire and it’s a HUGE source of passion.
Jenn: When we get to the nuts and bolts of the situation, the data shows that people are looking at your job advertisements more than any other single piece of content. And most TA leaders just don’t give a crud. So, tell me a little bit about Get-Optimal and what you’re doing to help improve job ads just from the start.
Daniel: You’re absolutely right – the first time a lot of people come into contact with your business is through your job ad. It is the most important piece of collateral if you’re a recruiter. It’s that moment where you can make a huge difference to the perception and the impression on a candidate – who is also a customer, let’s never ever forget that!
We built a 40-odd point algorithm, and all of these elements, which once they’re applied to a job ad, enable a 30% increase in the performance of that job ad. And when we say “increase,” we mean an increase in things like the quality of candidates as well.
Inclusivity and removing gender bias are key components of that. We also enable the job ads to be optimized for SEO (search engine optimization).
We used to have this little sort of trick that we’d use on some of our clients – apologies, anybody watching – we’d go into the meeting, and then we’d ask them all to get out their cell phones, and try and find the last job they posted, without searching by the brand. And we must have done this hundreds of times. No one could ever find the job they were posting. We understand SEO, and in a very moral way, we manipulate those algorithms to make sure your job ads are being seen by the quality of the candidates you need – to propel your business forward.
Jenn: Okay. So let’s unpack this a little bit. Most recently, I was very briefly a job seeker, and let me tell you, thumbs down on that experience. I was constantly surprised at even just the simple things, like spelling and grammar, and just incomplete sentences. So for those out in the field that haven’t seen Get-Optimal before, do you really just take a job description and make sure that it’s optimized for SEO and that there’s no spelling and grammatical errors?
Daniel: You know, it’s a really ridiculously obvious thing, isn’t it? With millions of new people coming on the market, you really need to have high quality candidates applying for your roles and (to your) job ads. And yes, it’s staggering how many job ads we pick up on to optimize for grammar, for spelling, and for punctuation. Just simple, simple things.
They’ve got to care a lot more about this piece of content that they’re posting. They’ve got to have some sort of pride in their job ads. So we, of course, optimize for spelling, the punctuation, and grammar, and you remove the unconscious gender bias, which none of us know, ultimately, is there.
The key thing with Get-Optimal is, we optimize for how candidates search for jobs. So we’re using the data and the insights to investigate the journey of the candidate, because we know that someone that clicks on a final job has gone through a series of searches and has clicked on different jobs as well.
Job ads are 90% science and 10% art. It needs to be well-written, but unless you’ve got these key data points optimized, it’s just a great job ad that ultimately no one’s going to see.
Jenn: What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen when it comes to job ads? Because we have different kinds of listeners – employment brand managers, recruiters, and TA leaders. So each of them have a different role in that job ad. What are some of the “uh-ohs” you’ve seen on those?
Daniel: I’m not preaching from any sort of position, because I went through this at Indeed for nine months – it took me nine months to get Indeed’s job ads changed because people didn’t think there was anything wrong with them, even though the average rejection rates for the jobs we were hiring for, internally, were north of 85%.
I had to work with 26 people to change their job ads, and some of these things were just “Let’s put a salary on sales roles,” because guess what? People aren’t going to apply for a role unless they can see the salary range.
Again, they might apply, but they’re completely the wrong band that we’re hiring for as well. I think working with TA leaders like yourself, and HR people every day, they haven’t got enough time in their day to do probably half of their role well. Most businesses that I’ve worked with, they don’t have anybody that’s ultimately qualified to write and optimize a job ad.
So one of the issues is not having the right structure – or the right formation of the team. We know and you’ve told us for centuries that you hate doing job ads, so we’re going to take that away from you – and we’re going to make sure it’s done to the very best. We’re going to give you that time back to go and source and place more candidates.
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Driving Diversity and Inclusivity via Job Ads
Jenn: A few months ago, pre-COVID, right, the market was so tight, particularly in the US, that we might have looked at any applicant as good traffic. That’s changed now, because companies are trying to do more with less, and the more unqualified applicants you get in, the more unqualified applicants your recruiters have to deal with.
I want to talk a little bit about gender bias and diversity in job descriptions. One of my roles at AT&T was around diversity and inclusion for recruiting, and we were always challenged to reduce unconscious bias in the writing – and it was a real task, because we posted a lot of jobs, and there wasn’t really a way to get to a best practice there. Does Get-Optimal handle that portion of it?
Daniel: One of the reasons for setting up Get-Optimal was just that inertia, that frustration, that companies go, “It’s fine. We’ll do our bit, we’ll take something off, we’ll put it in our slogan, or it’ll be one of the five pillars we’re working towards.”
On the other hand, you’ve got people that actively really want to make a change – and they can’t do that. Warren, my CTO, and the team have built our gender decoding tool, and what that does is, it removes any gender bias.
And again, this is never anybody’s fault, because it’s unconscious bias. If you’ve been trained to think in a certain way, you look at the diction you know, it’s what people are doing repetitively. That’s exactly the same thing with gender bias as well. Hopefully, we’ll start learning about it at a younger age, in education, and in everyday jobs as well. So eventually you don’t have to worry about that.
And also, our data has proven that gender wording commonly employed in job ads maintains a gender inequality in very traditionally male-dominated occupations. Across our client group, we had about a 22% increase in female applications on using our tool. To be honest, that was as good as any deal I’d ever closed, because it’s happening!
Optimizing Job Ad Content for Different Job Boards and Search Engines
Jenn: Should we do something different for Monster versus Indeed – or is it all the same?
Daniel: In terms of the data available, it’s all incredibly, incredibly similar.
Search engines, which is what they are, work on the premise (that) it’s based on content, and it’s based on relevance. They want to return whatever that candidate is searching for, whether it’s a warehouse operative role, or an account manager role, or district nurse, they want to return that search in as quick a time as possible based on the intelligence they’ve got: what job have I done previously, where do I live, gender, where have I worked before, what are my salary expectations?
So again, it’s about optimizing your job ad once, and then ultimately, it’s about publishing it across a number of different platforms. If you look at job boards – the Monsters of this world, or people like Reed in the UK – they’re stripping out all of their antiquated technology stack, and they’re integrating internal search functions, smart matching, and they’re all copying Indeed’s two-pane display as well.
Optimizing Job Ads at Scale
Jenn: We know that the knowledge-working jobs, the hard-to-fill engineering, math, and science positions that are always hard to fill, that continue to be hard to fill, haven’t gone away necessarily. We’re still trying to fill those as recruiting leaders.
While that’s happening, and other high volume openings are down in other places, it seems like a lot of TA leaders are doubling down on getting to best practices. So if I’m a TA leader, and I’m interested in optimizing a group of job ads, they have opportunities to do that on both small or large scales, right? People could do a handful of 100 jobs or 20 jobs or whatever, or they could do all of their jobs. You have some flexibility in that space. Is that a fair statement?
Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. We try and address all of the requirements of all of our customers on www.get-optimal.com. You can buy 15, 25, 35 credits, that was really built for the mom-and-pop shops that were asking us to do two a month, or five a year as well. But then for our more enterprise-based clients, we have a subscription service which runs over a 12-month period where you can optimize 500 a month. SMEs are doing probably 50 a month as well. So it hugely varies.
Obviously there’s no point optimizing, “these five, I won’t worry about those five.” That’s not a solution. We’re very flexible in terms of what we’re doing, in terms of pricing.
But when you’re measuring the success of working with Get-Optimal, you can measure the quality of the green-flag candidates coming into your pipeline, and we had a 77% increase in green-flag candidates coming into our largest client over Q2, which is fantastic.
Also – you can measure that from a diversity point of view, how much time you’re saving, whether you’re a business owner like myself, or whether you’re generally managing a big team across multiple countries and you’re maybe doing 250–500 job ads a month. We can save you tens and hundreds of hours each month.
Jenn: Well, thank you! This has been a ton of fun, and I appreciate your passion for a topic that I consider very important. For those that are viewing or listening out there in the world, I would encourage you to check out Get-Optimal’s website.
I would also just throw a shout out to the mission of reducing gender bias. I think that even if that wasn’t on your radar before you started watching this episode today, maybe you walk away with it on your radar.
