How to Post a Job Vacancy That Gets Real Applicants

You have a role to fill this month, no recruitment budget, and the free listing you posted last week brought you a handful of applications from people who clearly had not read it. That is the ordinary outcome, and the cause is almost always the same: the advert was written from the company’s side of the desk. A jobseeker scanning a list of vacancies is answering three questions — what is the work, where is it, and what does it pay — and most listings answer none of the three before the reader has moved on.

Put the role, the place and the pay in the title

The title is the only part of your advert most people will ever see, because it is what appears in a list of results next to everyone else’s. Spending it on “Urgent Requirement”, “Great Opportunity” or the name of your agency throws away the one line that does the work. “Diesel mechanic, Ludhiana workshop, 22,000–28,000 a month” tells a reader everything they need to decide in nine words. “Urgent requirement for reputed company” tells them nothing, and it is also what the four listings above and below yours say.

Write the job title the way a candidate would search for it, not the way it appears on your internal org chart. People look for “accountant”, “delivery driver” and “maths teacher”. Nobody searches for “Executive — Finance Operations (Grade II)”.

One vacancy per listing, not one advert for the whole hiring drive

An employer opening five roles at once is tempted to post one advert covering all five. It performs badly for a mechanical reason: a listing that is about everything matches nothing in particular, so it is never the best answer to any specific search, and a driver looking for driving work will not read past your two accounts roles to find it.

So split them — but split them properly. The same body text pasted five times with the job title swapped is refused as duplicated content, and where near-duplicates do get through, search engines pick one and quietly drop the rest. If you cannot write a genuinely different description for the second role, it does not need its own listing yet.

Put the pay in the price field

Roughly three in five live listings on this site carry no figure at all. For most categories that is merely unhelpful; for a vacancy it is fatal, because pay is the filter every candidate applies first. A listing with no number is read as one of two things: the pay is bad, or you have not decided. Both cost you the applications you actually wanted.

If the pay genuinely depends on experience, put the starting figure in the field and explain the band in the description — what the base covers, what moves it up, and what you need to see from a candidate to offer the top of the range. A stated range with a condition attached is far more persuasive than silence, and it saves you the interviews that were never going to end in an offer.

Describe the day, not the company

Three paragraphs about your organisation’s values are read by nobody. What a candidate wants is the shape of the day: the shift and the hours, whether it is six days or five, where they will actually sit or stand, what tools or licences they need to bring, whether there is travel, how long the probation runs and who they report to. Concrete detail does two jobs at once — it sells the role to the people it suits, and it filters out the people it does not, before either of you spends an afternoon on an interview.

“Six days, 9 to 6, own two-wheeler needed to reach the site” is worth more than a paragraph about a dynamic and fast-paced environment. If the honest version of the day puts some people off, that is the advert working, not failing.

Keep contact details out of the advert — including out of the image

Phone numbers and email addresses in the ad text are refused, and that includes a number burned into a banner or a poster image; images are read here, not merely looked at. For recruitment listings this rule earns its keep more than anywhere else on the site: a phone number attached to a hiring advert is exactly what gets harvested in bulk and resold, and the calls that follow are not from candidates. Every genuine applicant already has a route to you through the listing itself.

Never ask an applicant for money

No registration fee, no deposit for a uniform or a training kit, no charge for placement, and no “security amount” refunded after joining. Listings that do this are refused as spam or as inappropriate content, and quite apart from the rules, it is the exact shape of the most common recruitment scam in circulation. Readers know the pattern, so even a legitimate request for a genuine cost reads as fraud and takes the rest of your advert down with it.

Write it in English

Copy in another language is refused, because the readers browsing these pages cannot act on it. Mixed copy is caught the same way — an English job title over a description in another script. If a listing comes back for this, translate both parts and save it again; it returns to active without you starting over.

What gets a vacancy refused

A refusal is not a ban and not a judgement about your business. Every refusal names its reason, and every reason has a fix. The ones that catch recruitment listings are:

• Contact details — a number or an email in the text, or sitting in the image.
• Duplicated content — the same description across several of your roles, or the same role reposted while the first one is still live.
• Flagged as spam — usually one advert repeated across categories or cities to widen the net.
• Does not match the declared content — a title promising a job and a body selling a course, a franchise or an investment scheme.
• Not written in English — the title counts as well as the body.

Fix the thing named, save, and the listing goes back to active on its own. If you are hiring teachers for your own institute, note that the course itself is a separate advert with a separate job to do — do not try to make one listing recruit staff and enrol students at the same time.

Half an hour on the role you most need to fill

Take the vacancy that is costing you the most to leave open and give it thirty minutes:

1. A title with the job, the locality and the pay in it.
2. Two short paragraphs: what the person will do all day, and what they need to already know on the first morning.
3. The terms: shift, days, start date, probation, anything they must bring.
4. A pay figure, or a band with the condition that moves it explained underneath.
5. One photograph of the real workplace — the workshop, the shop floor, the office — rather than a stock image of a handshake.

Then post it and leave it alone. Listings run on a timer rather than disappearing quietly, so the useful thing to do next week is not to delete and repost the same text in the hope of looking fresh — it is to write up the second role properly.