Writing a Job Advertisement

Once you've chosen a medium for your advertising, you're ready to draft an ad. If you have a job description, this is the time to use it. You can use main points from your job description in your ad and save yourself some time trying to figure out what to say.

Regardless of the medium it will appear in, there are a couple of things to be mindful of when you're drafting a job advertisement:

• including the right information in your ad, to draw responses from the best candidates
• avoiding discriminatory language — this is more of a concern for employers with 15 or more employees, since they are subject to federal antidiscrimination laws, but smaller employees may be subject to state laws, and all employers should be mindful not to use discriminatory language in ads — it's bad PR, and many newspapers won't accept discriminatory ads

See our case study for an illustration of how the government looks at ads that may discriminate against people over 40.