Comment by Jerry Albright on January 17, 2011 at 10:30am

The world has changed. 

 

In my early days we would sit down with a piece of paper and "write the story" as my boss called it.  What's the company all about?  What exciting things would someone want to hear about?  Why would a qualified candidate consider looking into this?  Where are the advancement opportunities?  If we didn't know the complete picture - we had better not even THINK ABOUT talking to anyone about it.

 

Now so many are caught up in thinking they need to tweet or "update" their jobs.  Can't really get to deep with 140 characters.  Or even 120 characters since you're praying your network will RT it for you.

 

So what do we have now?  A nonstop stream of 15 word job ads.  Quite lame.  No consideration for the why/who/what.  Just a list of buzzwords crammed into a 2 sentence shout.

 

Failure will eat those who can't see beyond this.

Comment by FREYJA P. on January 18, 2011 at 12:33pm

Thank you Alasdair and Jerry! I am currently having a new website designed and have been watching current trends and thinking - has it really come to this? Do I really have to trash many of my core belief systems about our business? I believe in staying current but don't want to jump on every bandwagon that rolls through town, but was wondering if I had to. Thanks again for being to there to say "ain't necessarily so".

Comment by Alasdair Murray on January 18, 2011 at 1:03pm

To me it is just common sense, or a lack of it on the part of some recruiters/employers. I mean come on, your most valuable asset is your people and yet here was someone admitting that they couldn;t be creative, they couldn't sell the virtues of the organisation and the role properly because their content management system wouldn't let them? I won't tell you what my actual words were upon discovering this. Suffice to say 'unbelievable' was one of them :-)  Seriously, come on folks, sell the role, tell me how great it is to work there and what I'll be getting involved in when I join. Make me want to apply, not move on to the next dull and boring job description.

 

Now, for your delectation, here is a blog within a blog. http://www.etcetcblog.co.uk/2011/01/160/ A guide I wrote about how to approach the subject of writing recruitment advertisement copy. If just one person reads it and takes heed there will be one less awful job out there in web land - and that can only be a good thing, can't it?

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