It’s a good day to invest 45 minutes or so listening to Mitch Sullivan in conversation with Marcus Cauchi on The Inquisitor podcast, recorded last year. They discuss the importance of *selling* your job if you want to attract the right candidates. “Job adverts have an audience of one”, says Mitch. “Why should a successful candidate who has no…
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There are plenty of reasons other than pity to include disabled candidates in your target talent pool. Here are just 5 of them. 1. They’re an untapped talent pool. There are about 7.6 million people of working age who have some form of disability. This is a huge chunk (around 20%) of the talent market. Most…
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This is my attempt at starting an Urban Dictionary for recruitment. Aloofing The act of sounding distant or detached in your job adverts by describing the reader as “the candidate”, “the person” or “the incumbent”. Commonly practised by HR people and others who think that being rigid and formal is the same as being professional.…
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“Human being needed. Must be able to speak and listen. Some experience in marketing would be desirable.” Run that job ad and how many applications do you think you’d get? If we pull back from that particular nightmare scenario, describing your ideal candidate as “dynamic”, “ambitious” and “motivated” is pretty much speaking to every person…
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What’s really going on in the minds of someone who types out the words “this is an exciting job opportunity” then post what is little more than a massive list of tasks and demands? Are they expecting their target candidates to pore over long, boring content that has hardly any paragraph breaks to find little…
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About Me: I’m a brilliant (insert job title here). You’ll love employing me. I’m a great communicator and can work alone and as part of a team. I’m dynamic, passionate and have a growth mindset. Pretty good, eh? What I’m looking for: A job that is challenging and interesting, but only on days when I…
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This post follows on from our post about Job ads, recruitment and the law (part 1). The Advertising Standards Authority says that all ads must be ‘legal, decent, honest and truthful’. This means you should advertise jobs only if they are genuine vacancies, and the pay should be quoted accurately. But have any recruiters been…
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The age of the bot probably started back in the early 2000s. That was when job boards became a thing and it was cheap to post hundreds of ads that were just a copy & paste of the clients’ job descriptions. Then, whenever a fresh-faced graduate embarked on their career as a Talent Acquisition Consultant,…
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“Before you were a recruiter, you were a human being.” That’s a phrase often used by Jackie Barrie on our training courses. She continues: “And you need to write in a way that appeals to other human beings.” The problem with most recruitment adverts The problem we mainly see is that recruiters see other job ads and…
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How to be a better recruiter – straight from the horse’s mouth. If you haven’t listened to this podcast to hear Mitch Sullivan in conversation with Chris O’Connell, then you won’t have discovered: – The distinction between a JD and a job ad– Why Mitch switched from contingency to retained and then to recruiter training– How (and why) to…
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Here are two ads for a Production Manager. The original job description “Private, fast-growing engineering company manufacturing high-tech quality machinery for worldwide export has immediate opening for decision maker to manage production division. Production to double within the next year necessitates efficient coordination of rapidly expanding department. Right candidate must have minimum 10 years related…
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Are you getting hundreds (or even thousands) of applications to your job posts? The biggest reason is probably because there are a lot of available candidates in that particular job discipline right now. Are the majority of those applications not even remotely suitable? The biggest reason for that is they didn’t read the job post.…
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Here are some of the common descriptions used in 614,670 jobs advertised on Indeed today. I don’t even know if those are the most common words used on Indeed. I guessed. When every role is described the same way, how is the reader supposed to recognise themselves? Posting ‘ads’ like this means applicant CVs will…
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This post contains 3 points, an idea and a mini-lesson on recruitment ad copywriting. You know it’s a good idea to reveal the salary on your job ads. It helps attract more of the right people and filter out a few of the wrong ones. Here’s some of the data we’ve mentioned before that reinforces…
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I’ve just been reading an article that explains how to write the “perfect recruitment ad”. Gotta love that “perfect” thing, eh? A few paragraphs in, the author does admit there’s no such thing as a perfect recruitment ad, which I think was just his way of admitting he’s a clickbaiter. So for the purposes of…
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Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the immediate outcomes when training recruiters how to write effective job ads. What I mean by “immediate outcomes” is the quality of their first attempt at writing their ads differently after they’ve done the course and are sat in either a group workshop or a 121 coaching session.…
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When they’re something else entirely. Did you know that hiring managers don’t call themselves hiring managers? They might not even call themselves managers. They might be called supervisors or team leaders or any other job title that has responsibility for people. I know this, because I used to be one. Before I went freelance, I…
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It was back in 2015 when I read the best recruitment article I think I’ve ever read, and nothing has come close since. It’s called What It Really Takes To Attract Top Talent and it’s been written by Peter Cappelli who is a professor of management at the Wharton School in the USA. It argues that the majority of companies…
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“Bullets are easier to read”, they said. “The reader needs to know ALL the job requirements so they can decide whether to apply for the job”, they said. “They” more often than not, are a marketing intern. Someone whose only other work experience was selling discount bedroom furniture and who’s now working for a job…
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It would seem that recruiters are disliked. Even internal recruiters. How much they’re disliked will probably depend on the part of the market they work. IT Recruiters vs Executive Search Consultants. For example, IT recruiters are far more disliked than executive search consultants. The latter go into things in a lot more detail and tend to be more…
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