The Right Way To Post Job Openings

Ive been married since 1992. I barely have time for the husband I have, but if I wanted to get something going on the side, Id know just where to go. Many times a day I get spam marketing messages from websites whose purpose is to introduce married people to one another for the purpose of launching an affair. That isnt my cup of tea, but there are seven billion in the world, and different people want different things.

TIME magazine is a tiny pamphlet these days. My dad was a magazine publisher today we would say print magazine publisher but when my dad was working there was no other way to publish and he predicted the rise of ultra-targeted marketing when I was a kid in the nineteen-seventies. You cant blame advertisers for wanting to reach their specific niche of customers, he said.

Now an advertisers dream is reality. Advertisers dont flock to TIME magazine anymore, because whats the readership demographic for TIME? Its people who can read. Advertisers want more targeting than that. They want to reach just CPAs who own cats, or parents of talented-and-gifted twins.

We can reach any target market now. We can find just the people we want to talk to why should we bother anyone else, and why would we pay to reach the wrong audience?

Thats why it makes no sense when corporate and institutional folks complain that theyre awash in unwanted resumes and applications for their available positions. Have the last fifty years in marketing passed these people by?

They get deluged with responses because they arent targeting their job ads. They blast them out on every available medium and paste them on every surface. Of course theyre swamped with replies! The message in the job ad is Come one, come all!

We write job ads very badly and we market them badly. When you put a job ad up on any of the major careers sites, youre bound to get blasted with inappropriate resumes, but then again you asked for it. If you took the time to understand your target customer meaning the small set of perfect job candidates who could make a great fit for your opportunity before broadcasting your job ads far and wide, youd get far fewer responses to your ad and make your new hire more quickly.

Who wants to plow through piles of resumes? Some poor deluded managers believe that the more widely they spread the net and the more resumes they see, the more thorough their recruiting process has been. We hear that sentiment expressed every day. I really want to make sure I see a wide cross-section of the available talent market, managers say. Thats poor leadership and bad business. Youre wasting your own time and the time of many other people not just the candidates themselves but your colleagues in HR and recruiting, too to satisfy your curiosity and fill in the gaps in your knowledge of your own talent community.

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The Right Way To Post Job Openings