Job Adverts á la 2010 : A study of  content,  style, recommendations and students thoughts and perceptions

Abstract: This thesis is a study of Swedish job adverts published on recruitment websites. The thesis has a qualitative approach and is including three parts. The first part is an analysis of 50 job advert to create an understanding for what a job advert looks like today, 2010. This part study resulted in a prototype of a typical Swedish job advert published on recruitment web-sites 2010. The second part is a literature study in order to find out what the recommenda-tions from experts for writing job adverts are at present. This step generated a list of 21 kinds of advice that the experts recommend that one should think of when writing a job advert. The last part consists of group interviews with Swedish speaking business admini-stration students about their thoughts and perceptions of content in job adverts. The result shows that the respondents preferred job adverts that were branded (informed the applicant of the employer). They thought that the job adverts were very stereotype and written in a cliché language. And they also preferred job adverts that contained information about what employer could offer an employee apart from the job itself (in non financial terms). It was also clear that the students were reading in and interpreting a lot meaning behind the words. As an overall conclusion the study suggests that there is food for thought when it comes to how job adverts are being written in Sweden in 2010 and that the field of effec-tiveness of job adverts is in serious need of more research.