It would seem that advertising (including recruitment advertising) is a simple enough concept that has the potential to be understood by the general majority of our society. Make something look appealing enough for people to click through to discover more. Of course there are many more complicated definitions out there, but this is what it comes down to, or at least that’s my view.
And yet we keep blasting our poorly written job descriptions out there, using LinkedIn or Twitter (because that’s social recruiting, right?) and we seem to be shocked that our audience doesn’t find them attractive enough to apply. In fact, we despise applicants as we know most of them will not even be relevant.
Here’s a thought – if you want to attract people to the position you are looking to fill, here’s what you have to do:
A lot of the activities on the list involve understanding others, or at least trying to. I guess what separates really amazing recruiters from the rest is that they really do understand. It’s OK if it doesn’t come completely naturally and requires some work. But if you don’t even make that effort… well you should try being a candidate for a while. Maybe by applying for a job outside of recruitment. Because being curious is one of the requirements.
Why wasn’t it in the ad back when you applied?
Because just like Coca-Cola being bad for your teeth, it seemed like common knowledge to those writing the ad. I guess that’s on them 😉
2 Comments
Love the coca-cola example!
Unfortunately, there seems to be a consensus that job ads don’t work, especially in IT. The reality is, that the people writing ads very rarely try to understand the target audience, publish stuff that doesn’t resonate at all, or does resonate but with them only (not the target audience) and then don’t get the results.
Fortunately, there are loads of examples of people doing it right (I almost put “IT” in capitals here, but I’d die of the cliche overload, so opted against…)
Good advertising campaign = good message + in front on the right target group
Just my addition to the list of professional, comprehensive “advertising” descriptions 😉
Thanks for the comment Paweł 🙂 I completely agree… in fact whenever I hear someone say job ads don’t work, I’ll check how they write them. Often, they don’t work because they’re so long no one would even read through them. Sometimes it’s because it’s so hard to find them no one in their right mind would bother to look for them. That’s assuming they’re at least accurate. And yet recruiters still use “the war for talent” as an excuse for not being able to attract anyone with their job “ads”. If I had that problem, I’d probably attend the copywriting course that Mitch Sullivan runs… but often companies invest in fancy recruitment tools instead of training the team.