Monkeys are ruining your job adverts.
Moist monkeys are to blame.
Have you heard that story about monkeys in a cage, with bananas and a ladder?
Any time they tried to go up the ladder to get the delicious bananas, sadistic scientists would hose the lot of them down.
They hated that. Who wouldn’t?
So the monkeys soon stopped trying.
After a while, they swapped a monkey. The new monkey didn’t know about the hose so he tried heading up the ladder, but all the other monkeys kicked his head in. They didn’t want to get hosed again. The new monkey didn’t know what was going on, but didn’t fancy getting battered, so he gave up.
Then they swapped another monkey. He tried going up too, but again, there was a scrap to avoid the hosing. Even the previous new monkey joined in, although he’d never been hosed before.
Eventually all the monkeys had been swapped.
They’d still stop any newcomers trying to get the bananas, even though they didn’t know why. None of them had ever been hosed. The scientists had gone to the pub by this point and the hose returned to the garden centre.
I’m not interested in whether this really happened. It’s a fable about the folly of always doing the same thing as those before you.
This happens all the time with job ad writing. In this metaphor, your managers are the monkeys. I’m sorry, I’m sure you didn’t need that association reinforced.
Monkey see, monkey do.
It’s not that they don’t want you to produce successful job ads. They just don’t really know how and haven’t given it much thought.
They teach you the way they were taught. Like their managers were… and so on, up the chain of monkeys.
The original monkeys saw the way other people wrote job ads and they aped that.
There are two problems here:
- Doing the same as what everyone else is doing is a bit silly.
- What everyone else is doing was shit to begin with.
Shit because they’re not creative. Shit because they don’t focus on the reader. Shit because they’re job descriptions, not job adverts.
So, don’t be ashamed if your job ads weren’t very good before. Training on job ad writing at most places is little more than “copy this shit”. So most aren’t good.
But think of the opportunity that affords you. Every other monkey is smashing their nuts with a rock, but we can give you the blueprint for a nutcracker.
Look, if you want to be better, remember this; advertising a job is the same as advertising anything else.
You’ve got to get your audience’s attention.
And you can’t do that by being the same as everyone else. You’ve got to sell. And you can’t do that by being shit.
Be creative. Focus on the candidate. Make it an advert, not a description.
If you would like more thoughts and musings on recruitment, you might want to download Mitch’s free book “On Recruitment”.
