Effectively advertising job openings means making the most of your time, effort and money. Ultimately, you want to fill the job opening with the most qualified candidate. The best ways to do that will also enable you to fill the job in a timely manner. No one can tell you the surefire way to fill a job, but with careful assessment of available options, you can determine the most effective means for finding the right candidates for the position.

You already have the perfect photo and headline on your LinkedIn profile. Together, they lure candidates to click and scroll down to your summary. Now you have about five seconds to keep them on the page.

Your summary can be the difference between a candidate responding to your InMail – and not. But writing a good summary can be hard. Usually anything worth reading takes some blood, sweat and tears to write. Plus, there isn’t just one right way to do it.

If a blank page scares you or you’re not even sure where to start, then follow this guide to get to there faster.

Before you start

As with any writing task, first you need to identify your audience and your goal: whom you are writing to, what they care most about, and what you want them to do or feel afterward. These will be different for every recruiter. For example:

Recruiter #1

Audience: top software engineers in Seattle who value autonomy and flexibility.

Goal: excite them about engineering at your company and persuade them to respond to your InMails.

Recruiter #2

Audience: new graduates in the U.K. interested in marketing and advertising.

Goal: raise awareness of your company’s employer brand and drive traffic to your Careers Page and job postings.

Now, we can use these two recruiters as examples throughout the rest of the post to show how they would position their summaries to attract the talent they want.