Written for the employer running the ad, not for people looking for work. If you are after a job, the pay checker is the more useful page.
The uncomfortable answer first: the people you want are already employed, and employed people do not read job ads. An ad reaches whoever happens to be looking this fortnight. That is a much smaller and more random group than the market you think you are advertising to.
Everything else on this page is a fixable problem. That first one is structural, and it is why an ad can be well written, well priced and still bring nobody worth interviewing.
This is the most common single cause, and it is invisible from the inside. You benchmarked against what you currently pay, or against what the role paid when you last hired for it, and the market moved.
The tell is silence rather than bad applicants. If an ad runs three weeks and produces almost nothing, suspect the number before you rewrite the words. The award floor and market band for 17 roles are published on this site, so this costs you two minutes to rule out: check the rate.
Most ads describe what the employer wants and say almost nothing about what the person gets. Someone in a job they do not hate needs a reason to move, and "must have five years experience" is not one.
What actually moves people: the work itself, who they would be working with, the vehicle, the hours, whether the overtime is real or theoretical, and whether the site is a good one. Concrete beats adjectives. "Family business, eight sparkies, mostly commercial fitouts, van and fuel card, knock off at 3 on Fridays" outperforms two paragraphs about being dynamic.
Good candidates are usually in process with more than one employer. A week between application and first contact is long enough to lose them, and a fortnight of internal deliberation after a good interview is how you end up restarting.
The fix costs nothing: ring people the day they apply, and decide within days rather than weeks. Speed is the one advantage a small employer genuinely has over a large one, and most give it away.
Long mandatory lists do not raise quality, they shrink the pool. A ticket that could be obtained in a fortnight, or a software package that takes a day to learn, listed as essential, quietly removes capable people who would have been in the job for years.
Separate what is genuinely non-negotiable, usually a licence or a legal requirement, from what is merely convenient. Then advertise the first list and train for the second.
Advertising works when there is a pool of people actively looking who can do the job. For a lot of trades and operational roles right now, that pool is thin, and no amount of rewriting fixes a thin pool.
The signals that you are in that situation:
In that case the answer is not a better ad. It is going and finding people who are not looking, which means approaching them where they already are and giving them a reason to have the conversation. That is slower to start and considerably more reliable.
An empty seat on a $450 day rate costs about $2,250 a week in work not getting done. Eight weeks of a stalled ad is roughly $18,000, and none of it appears in the accounts because nobody invoices you for it.
That is the conservative version, counting only the day rate. It excludes overtime to cover, jobs turned down and the load on the people picking up the slack. The full working is on what an unfilled role costs you every week.
Worth holding against that: research commissioned by SEEK and conducted by advisory firm Nature, surveying more than 950 small businesses across Australia and New Zealand, put the cost of wrong hires to Australian small and medium businesses at $7.3 billion a year, with a single bad hire costing up to $16,000. Reported by SmartCompany, February 2026. Filling a seat badly to make the problem go away is the more expensive mistake.
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The most common cause is a rate below the current market band, and it is invisible from the inside because you benchmarked against what you already pay. Silence rather than poor applicants is the tell. Check the rate before rewriting the ad.
Three weeks is enough to know. If the rate is confirmed at or above the market band and three weeks has produced nothing, the problem is the size of the pool rather than the ad, and more time will not fix it.
No. Long mandatory lists shrink the pool rather than raise quality. Advertise what is genuinely non-negotiable, usually a licence or a legal requirement, and train for the rest.
Usually because they are in process with more than one employer and someone else moved faster. Ringing applicants the day they apply and deciding within a week rather than a fortnight fixes most of it, and it costs nothing.
Yes, when there is a pool of people actively looking who can do the job. They stop working when that pool is thin, which is the situation for a lot of licensed trades and operational roles, and no amount of rewriting changes that.
About five times the day rate every week in work not getting done, so roughly $2,250 a week on a $450 day rate. That figure counts only the day rate and excludes overtime, turned-down work and the load on your existing team.