With an unemployment rate near 3 percent finding the right talent in Hawaii can be difficult. When you can’t even find a cousin to fill one of your open positions you know things are tough. With a talent war waging on all fronts, business owners often make the error of overlooking the importance of having a well-crafted job advertisement. Don’t make finding qualified job applicants any more difficult than it has to be. Identify and eliminate these five ways that you might be ruining your job ad today and start attracting the job candidates your business deserves.

1. Mistake 1: Saying nothing about the company
   In an economy where the best candidates can afford to be choosy about where to work, business owners would be wise to advertise why working for their company is a great decision. One of the worst things you can do when drafting a job ad is to say very little about your workplace. Don’t forget—you’re writing an advertisement for the company itself, too. Your advertisement should present your brand in a way that all readers—qualified, unqualified, or just curious—can leave with positive impressions of your business.
2. Mistake 2: Unnecessary graphics
   A large percentage of job ads have too many unnecessary graphics. Clip art, memes, and stock photos might be fun to look at but they minimize your appearance as a professional organization. Anything that detracts from the message is unnecessary and needlessly turns away candidates.
3. Mistake 3: Unrealistic qualifications
   Entry level positions that require two years of experience can make your company look out of touch. Including wording like “experience preferred,” or variants thereof can avoid the trap that many employers fall into in letting perfection be the enemy of good. By setting such an unnecessarily high standard for the position, you’re potentially losing out on a multitude of highly skilled candidates that can be molded into a perfect fit for your position.
4. Mistake 4: Lifeless tone
   A boring, passionless job ad lacking any element of human touch is a fantastic way of preventing someone from getting excited about an open position—the exact opposite of what you want. If Heineken made a commercial consisting of a voiceless, frigid bullet list of ingredients that played during the Superbowl would you be driven to buy Heineken? If your job ad and by extension company is perceived to be lacking passion, how can anyone be expected to be enthusiastic and passionate about working for you?
5. Mistake 5: Long blocks of texts
   A job ad is the shock and awe campaign in your foray into the talent war. Make it short and sweet. Long blocks of texts and long lists of bullet-pointed job duties and responsibilities are better served as internal company documents that can be handed or emailed to a person upon interviewing for the position. Say just enough to give a brief overview of the position and its requirements, but know that most jobseekers are already skimming through the advertisement and aren’t remembering every job detail you’ve painstakingly written.

Writing job ads that are driven and produce results is not easy and takes years of feedback. By avoiding the aforementioned five mistakes and devoting time to purposefully crafting ads that speak to the concerns of jobseekers you just might find yourself interviewing the higher quality candidates your open positions deserve. There’s no better place to experiment with your job postings than posting job ads and reviewing candidates for free on RealJobsHawaii.com—Hawaii’s only 100 percent local job board free to both jobseekers and businesses. Just don’t include any clipart, please. We’re begging you.