Start with the brief, because the advert is mostly a reformatting of it #
Regulation 18 of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 already tells you what a brief has to contain. Before supplying a work-seeker, an agency or employment business must obtain from the hirer:
- The identity of the hirer and the nature of its business
- The date work is required to start and its likely duration
- The type of work, the location, the hours, and any risks to health or safety known to the hirer along with the steps taken to control them
- The experience, training, qualifications and any authorisation the hirer considers necessary or that the law requires
- Any expenses payable by or to the work-seeker
Read that list again as an advert. Title, location, hours, start date, duration, requirements. A brief taken properly has already written three quarters of the specification.
What the advert itself must say #
Regulation 27 sets the floor. Every advertisement must give the full name of the agency or employment business, and for each position, whether it is for temporary or permanent work. If an advert states rates of pay, it must also state the nature of the work, the location at which the work-seeker would work, and the minimum experience, training or qualifications required.
And an agency must not advertise a position at all unless it has information about specific positions of all types to which the advertisement relates, and the authority of the hirer concerned to find work-seekers for that position.
Where the repeated hours actually go #
Four places, and only one of them is writing.
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Chasing the brief
Getting the missing half of regulation 18 out of a hiring manager who is in meetings.
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Posting
The same role entered into several boards, each with its own categories, salary format, character limits and required fields, plus your own website and whatever the client’s own careers page needs.
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Amending
A salary band corrected, a closing date moved, a location clarified. One change, repeated everywhere the advert exists, including the places somebody forgot about.
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Reusing
The near-identical role that comes up three months later, rewritten from scratch because nobody could find the last one.
None of that is skilled work, and all of it has to be right, because an advert with the wrong salary in one place and the right salary in another is a conversation with a candidate you do not want to have.
The part that is genuinely the sell #
The sell is the opening two sentences, the honest description of the team, the reason this job is better than the one the reader currently has, and the decision about what to leave out. It is written differently for a warehouse shift and a finance director, and it is the difference between forty poor applications and eight good ones. It is judgement, it uses what the consultant learned on the client site, and it does not repeat.
Then the applications arrive #
The Totaljobs research of 15 August 2025 covered 748 HR leaders and 2,025 jobseekers.
17.7 hrs
manual admin per vacancy
Totaljobs, 15 August 2025
3.6 hrs
of that, reviewing applications
Totaljobs, 15 August 2025
That is in house recruitment rather than agency work, so use the shape and not the figure, but the shape is right: reviewing is one of the biggest single blocks in the hiring process, and a vague advert makes it bigger.
The obvious next thought is to automate the reviewing. That is a genuinely different question with duties attached, and it is covered in automated CV screening.
Which parts run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Capturing the regulation 18 brief in a consistent shape, and doing it badly is the root cause of most of the rest
- Assembling the specification section of the advert. Mostly
- Checking the advert names the business and says temporary or permanent
- Posting the same content to several destinations
- Propagating a change to every live copy, and this is where errors live
- Finding and reusing the last advert for a similar role, if anything indexes them
Needs a consultant
- Writing the sell
- Deciding what an honest advert can and cannot claim about a client
- Judging an application
Before you change anything #
Count how many adverts you posted last month, how many destinations each one went to, and how many of them were amended after going live. That third number is usually the surprising one.
The free tools turn counts like that into hours, and the same exercise on the output side is in reformatting CVs to your own template.