Two job adverts for the same role, and why only one filled it

Two adverts for the same role, written by two people in the same trade, in the same market, in the same month. One of them generated a very large number of applications and no hire. The other generated a small number and a hire who was still there a year later. The wording is where the difference started, and the wording is the part that is free to change.

The role in both cases is a service technician position at a small residential company: four people, a shop, mostly repeat customers.

The first advert

Growing company seeks motivated service technician to join our team. Competitive pay and benefits. Must be reliable, hardworking, and have a positive attitude. Great opportunity for the right candidate. Apply today.

This is the version most people write, and it is worth being precise about what is wrong with it, because the problem is not that it is badly written. It is that it contains no information. Every clause could describe any job in any trade at any company. Nothing in it would cause a single person to decide the job is not for them, which means it does no filtering at all.

The consequences are predictable. A large volume of applications, most from people who are not qualified and some from people applying to everything. Screening becomes the bottleneck, and screening is the most expensive part of hiring because it consumes the owner's time rather than anybody else's. Meanwhile the technician who is actually right for the role reads it, learns nothing, and does not apply, because they already have a job and this advert has given them no reason to consider leaving it.

The second advert

Service technician, residential HVAC, four person shop in the south end. You would be running one truck, mostly service calls on equipment we installed, with about a quarter of the week on maintenance agreements. On call rotation is one week in four with a stipend. Pay is a range depending on license level, plus paid time off, a matched retirement contribution, and we cover the tool allowance and continuing education. The van goes home with you.

We are looking for someone who can diagnose without calling for help on routine faults, and who is comfortable explaining a repair to a customer at their kitchen table. If you are early in your career and still learning to diagnose, we are not set up to train that right now, and we will tell you so rather than waste your time.

The second advert eliminates most of the people who read it, which is the point. Someone who cannot diagnose independently reads paragraph two and moves on. Someone who does not want an on call rotation reads that in line three rather than discovering it in week two. Someone who wants a large company with a service manager and dispatch understands within a sentence that this is not that.

What is left is a smaller number of people who read a description of the actual job and decided they wanted it. That is a substantially better pool even before anyone is interviewed.

What the honest version has to include

Four elements do nearly all the filtering, and adverts that work almost always have them.

• The actual shape of the week. What proportion is what kind of work, how much driving, what hours, what on call looks like.
• A pay range. Not a number, a range with the thing that determines where you land in it. Some states now require this in postings, and in the states that do not, including it is still the fastest way to stop wasting everyone's time.
• The size and character of the company. Four people in a shop is a completely different job from four hundred, and people have strong and legitimate preferences.
• What the job is not. The single most useful sentence in the second advert is the one saying they cannot train a beginner right now. It costs one applicant category and saves twenty screening conversations.

Pay transparency is the part of this that carries actual legal weight. Several states now require a pay range in the posting itself, the rules are not the same from one state to the next, and a posting used across state lines has to satisfy all of them. The wage and hour questions sitting underneath the job (what counts as hours worked, when overtime attaches, how a role is classified) are Department of Labor territory, but the rules about the posting are mostly state law, and that is where to look first.

Probation, and what it is actually for

A probationary period is commonly treated as a period during which someone can be dismissed easily. In most states that is not what it does, since employment is generally at will regardless. What a defined initial period actually does is create a scheduled, expected conversation, and that is its value.

Use it as a calendar rather than as a threat. Before the first day, write down what you expect the person to be able to do by the end of the first month, the second and the third. Meet on each of those dates, whether things are going well or badly. Most new hires who fail do so because nobody told them clearly enough what was expected until it was too late to fix, and a scheduled thirty day conversation catches that while it is still correctable.

Write down what is agreed at each meeting and give a copy to the employee. If the relationship does not work out, that record is what makes the ending clean. If it does work out, the same record is the basis for the pay conversation at the end of the period, which should be scheduled from the start rather than left for the employee to raise.

Where the two adverts differ on cost

It is worth being concrete about what the first advert actually spent, because the cost is real and invisible. Ninety applications at even five minutes each of reading and sorting is most of a working day, done in evenings by the owner. Phone screens for the twenty who looked plausible is another day. Four interviews that went nowhere is a further half day plus the disruption of covering the shop.

Against that, the second advert produced eleven applications, seven of which were credible, three interviews and a hire. The whole process took about a fifth of the time and produced a better outcome, and the only input that changed was a quarter of an hour spent writing a longer advert.

There is a second cost the first version carries that shows up later. When an advert is vague, the person who accepts the job has filled in the blanks with their own assumptions, and some of those assumptions will be wrong. The on call rotation they did not know about, the size of the company, the fact that they will be alone on most calls. Those discoveries arrive in week three and they are the leading cause of a new hire leaving inside six months, which puts you back at the start of the process having paid for the training in between.

Keeping the person you hired

The reasons small employers lose good people are consistent and mostly unrelated to base pay. Unpredictable schedules. Tools and vehicles in poor condition. Being sent to jobs without the information needed to do them. No visible progression. And the sense that the owner is the only person permitted to make a decision.

Each of those has a cheap fix. Publish the schedule further ahead. Fix the truck. Send the job history with the dispatch. Write down what the next level up requires and what it pays. Let the technician authorize a repair up to a stated dollar amount without calling.

Those changes cost very little and they compound, because a person who stays three years is dramatically cheaper than three people who stay one year each. The advert that filters honestly is the first step of the same process: it describes a job accurately, so the person who accepts it is not surprised, and a person who is not surprised is a person who stays.