HR copywriting competence in recruitment – how important is it?
A good recruiter must be able to organise the recruitment process properly and be able to offer and attract the best professionals and managers to the employer. It is in the candidate attraction phase that a particularly important competency emerges which, at first sight, may be classified as a public relations competency. This is the competence of copywriting and, more specifically, of HR copywriting. There are 3 main reasons why this competency is particularly important for recruiters and why it is worth investing in:
1.An external copywriter will not be a quality contributor to the content for recruitment
It is usually possible to simply outsource the creation of the job ad text and other recruitment sales messages to a copywriting company or a PR specialist. Unfortunately, this practice is theoretically possible, but is extremely time-consuming and usually results in a low-quality text. For example, copywriting a job advertisement is one of the most important preparatory stages in recruitment, where the cost of an error is particularly expensive.
The job advert must be drafted using knowledge of the labour market: what motivates candidates for a specific position, what technologies (buzzwords) they expect, how the requirements must be described in a technically accurate way, etc. Transferring all this knowledge to an individual copywriter can be extremely time-consuming, not least when it comes to checking and correcting the text sent. All these processes of transferring copywriting reduce speed and quality, so an external copywriter is not the way to go in a staffing project.
2.The importance of text quality in a recruitment project
The importance of textual content in a recruitment project is huge, but textual content itself is scarce. This means that a recruiter with good HR copywriting skills will not have much time to prepare the texts themselves, and the quality of the texts will be incomparably higher compared to a recruiter with no experience in recruitment.
3.Types of texts for recruitment
Typically, there are 2 types of texts that are key in a recruitment project: the job advertisement and related textual content, and sales messages that are sent directly to candidates who are not involved in the recruitment process. Of course, it is also important to have appropriate social media messages if the recruitment is public. So there are not many types of content, which just goes to show how important content is and how much influence it can have on the whole recruitment process.
So, if a recruiter lacks experience in HR copywriting, the whole recruitment project suffers and it is essential to develop this expertise quickly and to a high standard. This will definitely increase the recruiter’s autonomy and allow him/her to individually carry out the entire recruitment project from preparation to the correct placement of the candidate.
