As experts in employer brand and how it can help you attract, recruit and retain top talent, the team at Chatter Communications has long been fascinated with the role of the job advertisement. Its purpose is simple, yet the pressure is on it to ‘sell’ the company and the role to a potential employee in a few brief lines. Of course, that doesn’t work in a silo and brand reputation and wider awareness also comes into it – but you need a strong advert to pull someone in to exploring more. Yet it appears that many ads fail to resonate with the target. But what is switching potential employees off?

We took 230 UK job advertisements from companies within the FTSE 100. These covered a range of roles from engineering analysts and private bankers to LGV drivers and production operatives.

The job ads taken were chosen at random as the most recent jobs appearing on company’s own careers websites from 7th – 10th January 2022.

Chatter has developed a proprietary Readability Checker tool which we have been using to help our clients understand some of the unconscious biases there may be within their recruitment ads and wider copy. We applied this tool to the 230 job ads to analyse them for any gender biased language, along with how easy they were to understand.

Download our report to see what we found.