From time to time, you see a recruitment ad and say, “Man, I wish I had thought of that.” The truth is many job ads just aren’t great. But your recruitment creative doesn’t have to suck. In fact, it can be just as creative and fun as the rest of your job.

If companies like McDonald’s can entice students to apply and places like Murder Burger can write good ad copy for recruitment, so can you. All you have to do is borrow a few lines from their playbook.

Here’s how companies are creating great recruitment creative, and how you can too.

Embrace What Your Company Does

Murder Burger is known for their creative job ads, and one of them for cashiers is catchy and simple. It explains that while they can’t pay a cashier at their restaurant much, they don’t expect much of them either. It’s cute, creative, and talks about exactly what the job is and what the company does.

While you may be hiring for more than a cashier at a fast-food restaurant, you can still embrace what the position is, and what your company does. Your future employees will appreciate you setting their expectations from the start, and you’ll probably get better candidates as a result.

Showcase Your Company Culture

One example of showcasing company culture is HubSpot. They made an Instagram announcement and shared it on other social media as well as showing a team photo and stating that they won an award for the best workplace in technology.

The key takeaway? They included a call to action for interested candidates to apply, and they explained why they were a great place to work. You can take this same approach and apply it to your company as well.

Even if you are not award-winning (at least not yet), tell candidates about your company culture and why they would enjoy working for you. Showcase that culture through photos or video that illustrates what you are saying.

Showcase your Company Values

Job candidates are looking for more than just a good paycheck. In fact, many would take a pay cut to work somewhere that aligns with their values. What matters to them? Diversity. Going green and being environmentally and socially responsible. Providing a good work-life balance.

Highlight your company values. Gusto showcases their commitment to diversity in their recruitment ads. Atlassian and others show they know employees have a life outside of work, and they embrace that fact and encourage those pursuits.

Candidates are looking for companies who share their values, and you should be looking for employees who share your company values. It’s a win-win situation, and making them a part of your recruitment creative will make sure that your ads don’t suck.

Throw Some Humor in There

People want to have fun at work, and they want to laugh. If you can show your sense of humor in your recruitment copy, you will attract others who share it. Mailchimp used a Napoleon Dynamite lookalike ad to boost attendance at a job fair and notoriously made some hiring “cards” in the form of baseball cards containing job descriptions. Recruiters then handed them out at campus job fairs.

Not only was the response amazing, but they received applications from those who not only shared their values but their sense of humor as well. Using humor will impact your company culture overall since fun people make for a fun workplace. And funny recruitment copy doesn’t suck.

Emphasize Passion over Skills

There is a lot of talk about skills in recruiting, from hard skills needed to do the job and soft skills that enable a candidate to take on a new position and learn it. But one of the missing ingredients is often passion. Passion not only enables a candidate to learn but also inspires them to work even harder.

MIT media lab did this with an ad for “Undefined Discipline.” They deliberately were looking for someone with diverse disciplines they were well versed in, and someone “who is a misfit in normal situations.” The primary requirement was a passion for changing the landscape of media.

It was a creative way to highlight the need for passion over specific degrees or skills. Even if you have specific skill or degree needs for the position you are hiring for, start your recruitment copy with passion rather than those skills and see what happens.

Keep Your Target Employee in Mind

This is perhaps the most important key to recruitment creative that doesn’t suck. What traits do your ideal candidates share? What can you use to reach them in unique ways? What are they fans of? Where do they hang out, and what do they do there?

How do you find this out? Look at your current successful employees who have been around the longest. What do they have in common? What is different about them? Lean into that, and you’ll not only hire better employees who fit your culture, but you’ll know how to make recruitment creative they’ll respond to.

Recruitment creative doesn’t have to suck. If fast food restaurants and car washes can entice employees to respond to their ads, you can do it too. Just start with who your company is and what matters to you, and you’ll be on your way to recruitment creative that doesn’t suck. Because it doesn’t have to.

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