Here’s something I’ve been guessing at. And was probably wrong.
For years I’ve advised recruiters that one of the side-effects of publishing great jobs ads is that it reduces how many inappropriate people apply.
My thinking was that if a job ad was readable, more people would actually read it.
And that if people read it and weren’t suitable, they wouldn’t apply.
Plus, my own experience of publishing decent job ads was that I rarely ever saw more than around 30% of my total applications being completely irrelevant. And usually, many of those were from overseas and/or needed a work permit.
Turns out I might have been wrong.
A recent case study
A few weeks ago, I ran the ‘top of the funnel’ stuff for a client with an important job to fill.
It included helping them tweak their job advert and their job description. They’re an advertising agency, so both documents were already quite good. Actually, their job description was the best I’ve ever seen. More on that another time.
The job was for someone with previous Account Manager and Project Manager experience working for a creative ad agency.
Both the account management and project management experience were important. The account management part covered all the client-facing stuff and the project management was the part that involved building the specs, budgets and resources needed for each campaign. You could almost call it a pre-sales and a post-sales job rolled into one.
The words ‘Account’, ‘Project’, ‘Manager’ and ‘Ad Agency’ all appeared in the job title, which sits at the top of all job postings along with salary, location and anything else that might be relevant to someone deciding if they’re going to even start reading the ad.
Attention span of a fruit fly
But it would seem that some people only read one of those words before deciding to hit the ‘apply’ button. That word was ‘Project’.
I accept it’s an ambiguous word and will mean different things to different people. But still, applying for a job only because it uses a word that’s also in your job title?
Really?
Most of them were IT people who I thought were supposed to be smart. That they paid attention to detail. Some of them were employed, so they can’t use being desperate as an excuse either. The only excuse they might have is if they were using AI.
What I learnt is that no matter how good your job ad is, there will always be some people who apply without reading what they’re applying for. Even very employable people earning around £45-50K.
I wanted to ignore all of these applications, if only to encourage some of them to email me to ask why they hadn’t heard anything, just so I could tell them it was because they didn’t read the fucking job ad.
Instead I wrote an email (that I copied and pasted to all of them) saying they’d been rejected because I couldn’t find any evidence of them ever working for an ad agency. I worded it that way deliberately because I wanted them to know I’d given them the courtesy of looking at their CV.
How’s that for candidate care?
I resisted the temptation to accuse them of either not reading the ad or being a time-wasting idiot, mainly because I didn’t want to start trending on Twitter.
The numbers
I learnt something else that was interesting. But before I tell you that, here’s the the job ad and below is what it produced from LinkedIn, Reed and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising).
Total applications: 281
Candidates who were way off: 110 (none were from outside the UK)
Candidates who weren’t right, but could see why they applied: 114
Candidates worth a closer look: 57
Long list: 15
Short list: 8
I spoke to 20 people for roughly 10 mins each prior to compiling the long list.
It took 2 weeks to get to 1st interview stage and it was filled inside 4 weeks.
Most applicants got a response (to any email they sent) within 1 day. The longest anyone had to wait for a response to any follow up email was 2 days.
We probably could have filled the job several times over.
And, I lost count of how many people commented on how much they liked the ad – although some of them called it a job description, which pissed me off a little.
Here’s the other bit I found interesting
Many applicants liked the job ad enough to go to the client’s website. And if the client had a careers page (which this one doesn’t because they’re too small to need one) those people would have been looking at other jobs.
Recruitment agencies have other jobs on their websites, so it surprises me they don’t occasionally drive extra traffic by posting a great job ad. Other than increasing the chances of people remembering you, it would also produce more great candidates that can be placed with other advertising or marketing agencies. It almost made me wish I was an agency recruiter again.
One last thing
The client was brilliant. He took onboard my suggestions for improving the ad, and he reacted very quickly to assessing CVs and arranging interviews.
If all of the clients I’ve ever worked with had been this good, I wouldn’t look as old as I do.
