How to Write a Job Advert That Gets Applications

Quick Answer

A job advert that works does six things:

• Uses the job title candidates search for, not your internal one

• States the salary, or at least a realistic range

• Runs to roughly 300 to 400 words. Longer adverts do not perform better

• Puts pay, location and hours in the first screen, before duties

• Lists no more than five or six hard requirements

• Leads to an application that takes under five minutes

The last point is the one most employers never check. Around 92% of people who click apply never finish the application, and shortening the form to under five minutes has been shown to lift completion by 245%.

Writing a job advert is one of those tasks that gets handed to whoever has ten minutes free. The job description gets pasted in, a line about the company goes on top, and it goes live.

Then the applications do not come, and the conclusion is that nobody wants to work.

Irish unemployment was 5.1% in July 2026. The market is tight but it is not empty. If a role is not attracting applications, the advert is usually the first place to look. Here is how to write one that does its job.

Start with the title

The title decides whether anyone sees the advert at all. Everything else only matters after that.

Candidates search for the title they hold or the one they want. If your advert says Operations Coordinator Level II and the market calls it a Warehouse Supervisor, the advert will not appear in the searches that matter.

Test it in five minutes. Search your own vacancy the way a candidate would. If it does not come up in the first two pages, the title is the problem before anyone has read a word of the body.

Use the market title in the advert and keep the internal one for the contract. Avoid seniority codes, internal grades and anything invented. If the role is genuinely two things, pick the one people search for.

One thing worth knowing: Ireland's draft pay transparency legislation is expected to require gender-neutral job titles alongside salary disclosure. "Salesman" and "handyman" are already poor practice and will shortly be worse than that.

Put the salary in

This is the single biggest lever available and most Irish employers still are not pulling it.

As of March 2026, only 39% of Irish job postings include salary information. That is behind the UK on 56%, the Netherlands on 48% and France on 43%. Indeed's data shows the Irish figure was up three percentage points on the same period the previous year, so it is improving, but slowly.

Meanwhile around three in four women across Europe said they would be more likely to apply if the salary was stated, compared with roughly two in three men. In Ireland specifically, 82% of workers said a stated range would make them more likely to apply.

Employers who publish ranges report the outcome: 70% receive more applicants and 66% say quality improved.

There is a legal dimension too. Ireland missed the 7 June 2026 deadline to transpose the EU Pay Transparency Directive, and the Pay Transparency Bill appeared on the Summer 2026 legislative programme but not on the priority list. Draft Irish proposals go further than the Directive requires, pointing to salary disclosure in the advertisement itself, along with a ban on asking about pay history and a requirement for gender-neutral job titles and descriptions.

The direction is settled even if the timing is not. Employers who start now get the application volume benefit early. RTÉ covered the state of play in May, and IBEC maintains a pay transparency hub tracking the legislation for employers.

One caution on execution. Research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that very wide salary ranges deter applicants, with women showing a consistently stronger preference for narrower bands. A €30,000 to €55,000 range is not transparency, it is an admission that you have not decided. Post a band you would genuinely pay within, and use the Salary Guide Ireland to check it against the market before you do.

Write less than you think

The instinct is that a longer advert is a more informative one. The data says otherwise.

A July 2026 analysis of 1,243 live UK job adverts across twelve occupations found the median advert runs to 408 words. Job board data suggests the highest apply rates, around 8 to 8.5%, come from adverts in the 201 to 400 word range.

The more interesting finding is what happens inside a long advert. Comparing the longest third of adverts against the shortest, the benefits section grows 5.2 times, duties grow 2.5 times, and the opening pitch doubles. Requirements, the part that actually tells a candidate what you want, grows least of all at 1.8 times.

Read as a share of the page, it inverts completely. In short adverts, requirements is the biggest section and benefits the smallest. In long adverts, benefits becomes the single biggest thing on the page, bigger than the job description itself, while requirements shrinks to under a fifth.

So a long advert is not a more informative advert. It is usually the same job description with more perks bolted on the front.

Aim for 300 to 400 words. If you are over 500, the cut is almost always in the company blurb and the benefits list, not the part describing the work.

Order matters more than length

Most candidates decide in the first screen of their phone. Put the deciding information there.

First screen:

• Job title

• Location, and whether there is any flexibility

• Salary or range

• Hours or shift pattern, stated plainly

• Contract type

Then, in this order:

• What the person will own, in three or four lines

• Five or six hard requirements

• Anything genuinely distinctive about the role or the team

• What happens next and how long it takes

What goes last, or not at all: the paragraph about your company's history, values and commitment to excellence. Nobody has ever applied because of it, and at the top of the advert it pushes the salary below the fold.

Two specifics that get skipped constantly and cost you applications: shift patterns and start times. "Flexible hours" tells a candidate nothing. "Monday to Friday, 7am to 3.30pm, with occasional Saturday mornings in peak season" lets them decide immediately whether it works around school runs, buses and second jobs.

Cut the requirements list

Requirements lists tend to describe the person who left rather than the job that needs doing. Ten years gets specified when the real need is experience at a particular scale. A qualification gets marked essential when it could be trained in a fortnight.

This has a measurable cost. Many candidates, particularly women and people from underrepresented groups, will not apply unless they meet close to all of the listed requirements. Every optional item on that list is quietly filtering out people who would have done the job well.

Keep it to five or six genuine essentials. Go through your current list and mark each item honestly as essential or preferred, then delete the preferred ones from the advert. You can still weigh them at shortlist stage, and you will have a wider field to weigh them against.

The apply process is where most adverts die

This is the part almost nobody audits, and it undoes everything else.

Recruitment advertising data from Appcast puts the candidate drop-off rate at around 92% for people who click apply and never submit. Applications completed in one to five minutes see an apply rate around 12.5%. Those taking over fifteen minutes drop to 3.6%.

Shortening an application to under five minutes has been shown to lift completion rates by 245%. Requiring account creation before someone can apply increases abandonment by around 40%. The average online application has between 45 and 60 fields.

It is worse in some sectors than others. Hospitality has an application abandonment rate of around 68%, the highest measured, largely because 72% of hospitality candidates apply on a phone and long desktop forms do not survive contact with a mobile screen. If you are hiring hospitality staff or general operatives, assume mobile first.

Four fixes, in order of impact:

1. Time your own application. Fill it in on a phone, start to finish. If it takes more than five minutes, it is too long.

2. Remove account creation. It is a barrier with no benefit to the candidate.

3. Stop asking for information twice. If they upload a CV, do not make them retype the work history.

4. Move the optional questions to later. Salary history, references and detailed dates can wait until after you have spoken to them. Salary history is about to be prohibited anyway.

   
   

Before and after

Here is a real pattern, anonymised. The original ran to 620 words and produced four applications in three weeks.

Before:

After, at 340 words:

Same job. The second version tells someone whether to apply in about fifteen seconds.

A checklist before you post

• Would a candidate find this by searching the title?

• Is the salary or range in the advert?

• Is the range narrow enough to mean something?

• Are pay, location and hours all visible without scrolling?

• Is it under 400 words?

• Are there five or six requirements, or twelve?

• Does it say what the shift pattern actually is?

• Have you filled in your own application form on a phone?

• Does it say what happens after applying?

If a role is still not attracting applications after all of that, the issue is likely upstream of the advert. Our companion piece on why your vacancy isn't getting applications covers the process and market causes.

Key Takeaways

• The job title decides whether anyone sees the advert. Use the market title, not your internal one.

• Only 39% of Irish job postings show pay, and 82% of Irish workers say a range makes them more likely to apply.

• Ireland missed the 7 June 2026 pay transparency deadline, but the draft law points to salary in the advert itself. Start now.

• Keep salary ranges narrow. Very wide bands deter applicants, particularly women.

• The median job advert is 408 words. The best apply rates sit in the 201 to 400 range.

• Longer adverts add benefits and duties, not clarity. Requirements shrink to under a fifth of a long advert.

• Put pay, location and hours in the first screen, above duties and well above the company blurb.

• List five or six hard requirements. Delete the preferred ones.

• Around 92% of people who click apply never finish. Under five minutes lifts completion by 245%.

• Hospitality abandonment runs near 68%, driven by mobile. Test your form on a phone.

Most underperforming job adverts are not badly written. They are internal documents that were never rewritten for an external reader.

A job description exists to define a role for the organisation. An advert exists to help one person decide, in about fifteen seconds on a phone, whether this is worth their time. Those are different documents and the second one is shorter.

If you change one thing, put the salary in. If you change two, use the title people actually search for. If you change three, fill in your own application form on a phone and see how far you get.

And if the advert is right and the applications still are not coming, the role may not be one that advertising will fill. The person who suits it is employed elsewhere and is not looking, which needs a direct approach rather than a better posting. That is where recruitment support earns its fee.

FAQs

Total Solutions is a recruitment agency based in Lucan, Co. Dublin, placing temporary, permanent and contract staff across construction, warehousing, hospitality and office support.

If a role has been open longer than it should be, talk to us about the brief. More employer guidance in the Insight Hub.