Recruitment copywriting - does tone of voice matter?
By Mitch Sullivan,
When talking about tone of voice, Innocent Drinks is often held up as a paragon of virtue. That is until it comes to their recruitment copywriting and job ads.
Here are the opening lines of the first 5 ads (in English) on their site recently:
Commercial Finance Business Partner
“Here at innocent, we’re on a mission to make it easier for everyone to get more fruit and veg into their bodies. We started back in 1999 and since then we’ve gone from selling a few smoothies at a music festival to becoming one of Europe’s biggest drinks companies with around 1,000 people (and the B Corp seal of approval).”
Vulnerability Management Engineer
“Here at innocent, we’re on a mission to make it easier for everyone to get more fruit and veg into their bodies. We started back in 1999 and since then we’ve gone from selling a few smoothies at a music festival to becoming one of Europe’s biggest drinks companies with around 1,000 people (and the B Corp seal of approval).”
Head of Revenue Growth Management
“Here at innocent, we’re on a mission to make it easier for everyone to get more fruit and veg into their bodies. We started back in 1999 and since then we’ve gone from selling a few smoothies at a music festival to becoming one of Europe’s biggest drinks companies with around 1,000 people (and the B Corp seal of approval).”
Field Sales Developer
“Here at innocent, we’re on a mission to make it easier for everyone to get more fruit and veg into their bodies. We started back in 1999 and since then we’ve gone from selling a few smoothies at a music festival to becoming one of Europe’s biggest drinks companies with around 1,000 people (and the B Corp seal of approval).”
Senior Key Account Manager
“Here at innocent, we’re on a mission to make it easier for everyone to get more fruit and veg into their bodies. We started back in 1999 and since then we’ve gone from selling a few smoothies at a music festival to becoming one of Europe’s biggest drinks companies with around 1,000 people (and the B Corp seal of approval).”
Can you see where they’re going wrong?
These introductory paragraphs are all about the company and nothing about what’s in it for the reader. Unless people are banging on the door to work there, this approach doesn’t work.
Innocent might be one of the few companies that can get away with it. Plenty of people want to work there. But wanting to work somewhere is a reason to apply for a job you already know something about. It does nothing for the vulnerability management engineer who’s happy where they are and has never once wondered what it’s like to work for a smoothie company.
That engineer is most of the market. Somewhere around 80% of the people qualified for any of these roles are already employed. They aren’t looking. They have choices, one of whichis to do nothing.
The repetition is the other giveaway. Five different jobs. Five different groups of people with different reasons to move. A security engineer and a key account manager want different things from their next job. They both got the same paragraph. That’s what a job ad looks like when it’s written for the company’s convenience.
So where does tone of voice come in?
The paragraph is well written. It’s friendly. “Fruit and veg into their bodies” and “a few smoothies at a music festival” sound like Innocent. It doesn’t matter, because by the end of it the reader has already decided whether this is about them. It isn’t.
What you say comes first. How you say it comes second. Tone of voice can make a relevant message easier to read and easier to believe. It can’t make an irrelevant one relevant.
Most tone of voice advice for job ads skips this. It’s a list of adjectives - friendly, warm, authentic, approachable - and an instruction to sound human - which is fine as far as it goes. A conversational ad is easier to read than a corporate one and short sentences and plain words keep people reading. If what they’re reading is the company’s founding story, a better voice just gets them to the bottom of it faster.
Each of those five ads should open with what that job offers the person who’d be good at it. For the field sales role, that might be the territory or the earning potential. For the engineer, the problems they’d be solving and the kit they’d be using. The mission and the B Corp status are good selling points once someone’s interested, so they go further down. Then Innocent’s voice can make the whole thing sound like Innocent.
So yes, tone of voice matters. Just not first. One of the most admired brand voices in the UK is currently being used to say the wrong thing, five times.