“Job ads don’t work.”
I hear this a lot from recruiters.
Yet it doesn’t seem to stop most of them posting lots of job ads.
Maybe they’ve bought into the ‘chuck enough mud’ recruitment principle – a principle made popular by the invention and easy accessibility of job boards.
Another popular phrase I hear from recruiters is “We don’t advertise much because we’re really headhunters.”
Yeah, right.
Presumably these headhunters just read out the job spec when they get these hard to find, passive, talented, A-players on the phone?
I don’t want to take up too much of your time, so here’s the bottom line on posting job adverts…
Recruitment advertising only doesn’t work for people who are bad at it. For everyone else, it accounts for a significant percentage of all the jobs they fill.
The issue gets complicated only because many of the people who are bad at it, think they’re good at it.
The good news is that even running bad job ads sometimes works when:
- There are lots of available candidates for that particular job.
- The hiring company is called Google or Disney or Apple.
If you know you’re bad at writing job ads and would like to stop being bad at it, you might want to consider investing in some training.
If you’re one of those people who think their job ads are pretty good, feel free to send me one of them for a free critique.
Not only will I tell you if they’re good or bad, I’ll also tell you why they’re good or bad.
If you would like more thoughts and musings on recruitment, you might want to download Mitch’s free book “On Recruitment”.
