How to announce that you are hiring
A hiring post is aimed at somebody who is currently employed, mildly content, and not looking. That reader is the one worth reaching, and almost every "we are hiring" post is written for the reader who is already applying to everything.
The audience is not your audience
This is the only announcement on the list whose target reader is probably not following you. It travels by being forwarded, which means it has to survive being read by somebody with no context and no existing interest in the company. That inverts the usual advice. Enthusiasm about the team reads as noise to a stranger, and the qualities that make a recruitment post shareable are the concrete, faintly unflattering specifics that a careers page would sand off: the size of the team, the state of the codebase, the salary band, the part of the job nobody enjoys. A post that could describe any company is a post that gets forwarded to nobody.
The rule for this one
Write it to one person who is content in their current job. Include at least one fact that would put off the wrong applicant.
What the category publishes, and what the rule produces.
The first draft is a composite written to match the register the ranking pages for this query actually publish. It quotes no company and no real post. The second obeys the rule above and nothing else, so anything that changes between them is the rule doing it.
The version everyone posts
We are hiring! Our team is growing and we are looking for a talented Senior Engineer to join our fast paced, dynamic environment. If you are passionate about building great products and want to work with an incredible team, we would love to hear from you. Apply now at the link below.
The version that obeys the rule
We need a senior backend engineer who likes owning a system end to end. You would be the third engineer, so the work is unglamorous and the decisions are yours. The salary band is published in the posting. If you are happy where you are, this is probably not worth your afternoon.
Every phrase in it is true of every company hiring anyone. "Fast paced" and "dynamic" are not descriptions, they are the absence of one, and a reader with a job needs a reason specific enough to be worth a conversation.
6 of 10 measured dimensions moved.
Both drafts were read by the engine behind our free brand voice generator. It is arithmetic over the text rather than a judgement, which is the reason it is used here: every figure below can be checked by counting the draft printed above it.
| Dimension | Before | After | Moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentences | 4 | 4 | No |
| Words | 52 | 52 | No |
| Average sentence, in words | 13 | 13 | No |
| Longest sentence, in words | 23 | 16 | Yes |
| Contractions per 100 words | 0 | 0 | No |
| Speaks to the reader | No | Yes | Yes |
| First person (we, our, us) | 5 | 1 | Yes |
| Second person (you, your) | 2 | 5 | Yes |
| Vocabulary richness, out of 100 | 81 | 75 | Yes |
| Contains a stock phrase | Yes | No | Yes |
Read across all fifteen moments the pattern is sharper than any single page: the hub has the corpus numbers.
What earns the post
- The size and shape of the team they would join, as a number.
- The part of the job that is genuinely tedious, named without apology.
- The band, or the reason there is not one. Withholding it filters for the wrong people.
When not to post it at all
Skip it when the role is not signed off. A hiring post retracted or left open for six months is read by candidates as evidence about how the company makes decisions, and they are not wrong to read it that way.