How to Write a Job Post That Gets Hourly Applicants in the US, UK and Nigeria

Most hourly job posts fail in the first three lines, and they fail the same way in every market: they describe the company, then the ideal person, and only then, if at all, the pay and the hours. The applicant reading it is on a phone, between shifts, comparing four adverts in five minutes. They are not looking for your mission statement. They are working out whether they can afford the job, get to it, and start it this week.

This guide is about writing the post that answers those questions first. It covers the four lines applicants actually scan, how to word the title and pay, what you must not write in the United States, the United Kingdom and Nigeria, and how to screen in the first message without losing the good candidates to a faster employer.

The four lines an applicant is scanning for

Every hourly applicant is looking for the same four facts, in roughly this order. If they are not in the first five lines, the applicant moves on, and the ones who move on fastest are the experienced ones with options.

Notice what the right-hand column does. Each line lets someone rule themselves in or out without contacting you, which is the entire point: you want fewer, better applications, not more of them. A post that says “flexible hours” gets applications from people who then discover the shift starts at six in the morning, and you have both wasted a week.

Title and first sentence

Use the words people search with, not your internal job title. An applicant types “warehouse”, “cleaner”, “server” or “dispatch rider”. They do not type “Facilities Operative Level 2” or “Team Member, Guest Experience”, and a post with an internal title reaches almost nobody.

The vocabulary also differs by market, and the wrong one reads as a foreign advert:

• United States: server, line cook, dishwasher, warehouse associate, janitor, delivery driver, general labourer, security officer.
• United Kingdom: waiting staff, kitchen porter, chef de partie, warehouse operative, cleaner, multi-drop driver, labourer, door supervisor.
• Nigeria: waiter, cook, cleaner, warehouse attendant, dispatch rider, security officer, site labourer.

Then make the first sentence the offer, not the introduction. “We are a family-run business established in 1998” tells the applicant nothing they can act on. “Cleaner needed for one office building in Essex, 18:00 to 21:00, Monday to Friday, £12.60 an hour, start next week” tells them everything, and the people who reply have already agreed to the terms.

Requirements: list only what you will actually check

Every requirement you add removes applicants, including good ones who could do the job. So list the things you will genuinely verify on the first day and nothing else.

For hourly trade and site roles those are usually a card, a licence or a certificate: OSHA 10 or a state Site Safety Training card in the United States; a CSCS card, SIA licence, Gas Safe registration or a food hygiene certificate in the United Kingdom; a trade test grade, NEMSA certification, a rider’s licence and LASDRI card, or a food handler medical certificate in Nigeria. Name the exact one you need. “Relevant certification” makes an applicant guess, and the ones who guess wrong are the ones who apply anyway.

Separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves explicitly, and say which ones you will pay for. “You need a valid driving licence. We fund your forklift ticket after three months” is a better recruiting sentence than any description of company culture, because it is a concrete promise about the applicant’s future earnings.

United States: protected characteristics and pay transparency

Two bodies of rule shape a US advert. The first is anti-discrimination law: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, enforced by the EEOC, make it unlawful to publish a preference or limitation based on race, colour, religion, sex including pregnancy and sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. Coded wording counts. “Recent graduate”, “young and energetic team” and “digital native” are read as age preferences; “must be able to lift 25kg” is fine only if lifting is genuinely part of the job, in which case describe the task rather than the physical requirement wherever you can.

The second is pay transparency. A growing number of states and cities require a pay range in the job posting, including California, Colorado, New York State and New York City, Washington, Hawaii, Illinois and Minnesota, with thresholds and details that vary. Several states also prohibit asking for salary history. The list changes almost every year, so check your own jurisdiction before you publish. Even where it is not required, publishing the rate is the single change that most improves applications for hourly work.

United Kingdom: the Equality Act, and describing the job not the person

The Equality Act 2010 protects nine characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. An advert that expresses a preference on any of them is unlawful, and the most common accidental breach in hourly recruitment is “must be a native English speaker”, which is treated as nationality discrimination. Write the requirement the job actually has: “you will take orders from customers, so you need to be comfortable speaking English with the public”.

Three more UK-specific points. Right-to-work checks happen after you make an offer, not in the advert; asking for immigration status up front is both discriminatory in effect and unnecessary, since you must check every successful candidate regardless of nationality. Pay must meet the National Living Wage for the age band, and advertising below it is not lawful; the rates change each April. And be careful with the word self-employed: labelling a role self-employed when you control the hours, the uniform and the method does not make it so, and tribunals look at the reality rather than the contract.

Nigeria: written terms, no fees, and signalling that you are real

Section 42 of the Constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds including sex, religion and ethnic group, so “female only”, “male candidates preferred” and requirements tied to age, tribe or religion do not belong in a post. The Labour Act requires written particulars of employment within three months of starting and does not permit charging a worker for a job.

The bigger practical problem in the Nigerian market is that so many fake adverts demand payment for training, uniforms, forms or “processing” that good candidates are wary of every post. That means a legitimate employer has to signal legitimacy explicitly, and it is easy to do:

• Use your registered business name and say what the company does.
• Give a physical address and the local government area, not just a phone number.
• Name a real contact person and a role.
• Say plainly: no fees at any stage, for the application, the interview, training or a uniform.
• Say whether the role is on written terms with pension remittance, because that sentence separates you from most of the market instantly.

Those five lines cost you nothing and materially change who applies.

Pay: write the number

“Competitive” is read as “low”, and by experienced applicants as “disorganised”. Write the figure, and write the unit: per hour, per day, per month. If you must give a range, keep it narrow, because a wide range tells nobody anything.

Then state the parts that change what the job is worth, since these are exactly what a good applicant will ask about anyway:

• Overtime: whether it exists, at what multiplier, and after how many hours. In the US it is one and a half times beyond forty hours by law; in the UK and Nigeria it is whatever you offer, so say so.
• Shift premiums: nights, weekends, cold store. State the figure per hour, not the percentage.
• Tips or service charge: how they are distributed and roughly what they came to last month. In the UK, say that tips are passed on in full through a tronc, since the law now requires it.
• How often you pay: weekly, fortnightly, monthly. For hourly workers this genuinely affects whether they can take the job.

Shifts, location and start date

Write the actual days and times. “Full-time” and “flexible” are not schedules, and an applicant with childcare, a second job or a bus timetable cannot act on them. If the pattern rotates, describe one cycle: “four on, four off, 06:00 to 18:00 and 18:00 to 06:00 alternating”.

Name the district, not just the city. “London” covers an hour and a half of travel; “Greater London, near the Essex border, 10 minutes from the station” lets people who can actually get there apply. On sites and in industrial estates, say whether there is public transport at the shift start and finish times, because transport at 05:30 or after midnight is the most common reason a new hourly worker leaves in the first month.

Finally, give a start date and the expected duration. “Start Monday, ongoing” and “Start 1 October, 12-week project” are different jobs, and being honest about the second attracts people who want exactly that.

Screening in the first message

For hourly roles, speed beats process. Candidates usually accept the first reasonable offer, so a reply three days later reaches someone who has already started elsewhere. Reply within 24 hours, even if it is only to arrange a call.

Ask two questions in that first message, not ten. The right two are almost always: can you do these exact shifts, and do you hold this exact card or licence, and when does it expire. Those answers eliminate most mismatches, and everything else is better discussed on the phone. Long application forms lose good hourly candidates entirely; they are filling this in on a phone between jobs.

After they apply: the first 48 hours decide who you hire

The post is half the job. The other half is what happens in the two days after someone applies, and it is where most hourly vacancies are actually lost. Candidates for hourly roles typically apply to several employers in an evening and accept whichever offer arrives first that meets their conditions. An employer who runs a tidy week-long process is competing against one who phoned on Tuesday morning.

A workable sequence for hourly hiring looks like this:

• Reply within a day, always. Even a two-line message that says when you will call keeps a candidate warm. Silence is read as rejection, and the person you wanted moves on.
• Screen by phone, not by form. Five minutes on the phone settles the shifts, the location, the card and the start date better than any application form, and the candidate hears a person rather than a process.
• Interview once. For an hourly role, a second interview loses more good candidates than it filters out bad ones. Where you need to see someone work, use a paid trial shift or a working interview and say up front how long it is and what it pays.
• Make the offer in writing the same day. Rate, hours, start date, location and who to report to. In the United Kingdom you must give written particulars on or before the first day; in Nigeria the Labour Act requires them within three months, and giving them at the start marks you out.
• Do the compliance checks after the offer. Right-to-work checks in the UK, I-9 verification in the US, and any DBS or licence verification belong at this stage, not in the advert.
• Confirm the day before the start. A message the evening before with the address, the time, what to bring and who to ask for cuts no-shows more than anything else on this list.

Two habits are worth building alongside that. Tell unsuccessful applicants, in one line, because hourly labour markets are local and people talk; the candidate you reject politely is the one who recommends you to a friend who is better. And keep the applications you liked but could not use, because you will be hiring for this role again within months and a warm name beats a new advert.

Finally, treat a vacancy that will not fill as information rather than bad luck. If two rounds of a well-written post produce nobody, the rate is below the local market or the shift pattern is one that people with options do not accept. Both are fixable, and both are cheaper to fix than running the advert a third time.

How a Hirovo post reaches people

Posting on Hirovo is free. What matters for reach is that you choose the trade from the catalogue rather than typing a title, and that you set the country, city and district accurately, because both are how the post is matched to people.

Workers add the trades they do and the place they live to their profile, and posts near them appear without them searching. The same two choices decide where your post is listed publicly: a cleaning job in Los Angeles County appears on the cleaning page for Los Angeles County, a waiting job in London on the Greater London page for waiting staff, and a warehouse job in Lagos on the Kosofe warehouse page. Wider pages exist for each region, such as all locations in Texas, so a post placed in the right district is also found by people browsing the area.

Applications and messages arrive in one place, so you are not tracking candidates across a phone, an inbox and a notebook. And because applicants can see what other posts in the same district offer, the post that states its rate and its shifts is the one that gets answered.

Summary

Write for the person on a phone between shifts. Give the pay figure with its unit, the exact days and hours, the district and how to get there, and the one card you will really check. Cut everything that does not help someone decide, and cut every requirement you will not verify.

Then check the legal side for your market: pay transparency and protected characteristics in the United States, the Equality Act and the wage floor in the United Kingdom, written terms and no fees in Nigeria. Publish, reply within a day, and post separately for each site and shift pattern. A post built that way fills in days, and it fills with people who already knew what they were agreeing to.