Part Two: Job Postings: Jobseekers are Desparate to Read them but Recruiters dread writing them.

Yesterday I shared something I learned from a book I was reading called, "Recruit or Die". It turns out that the five common on-campus advertising mistakes also apply to advertising in general. Today the information regarding job postings is just as applicable. My background in recruitment has been primarily in health care. One thing that I've noticed is that job postings in general have either too much information or not enough. At one point in my recruitment career I thought about having Marketing weigh in on the message that we were communicating to our jobseekers. This of course was branding before branding was popular.

So to the job posting. In all of the HR positions I've been in there never seemed to be a clear understanding of whose responsibility it was to write the job postings. If marketing did it the jobseeker wouldn't understand the job. If the hiring manager did it the jobseeker would be scared to apply to the job and if HR did it, well you get my drift. At the end of the day, no one wanted to do it.

Another challenge may be that when you decide to post a job you may not have all the information you need to communicate to the jobseeker what you are looking for. An example of this would be for jobs that interns or students are looking at for after graduation.

Bottom line is that your job posting has to be compelling. Most jobs are discovered by word of mouth or after meeting with you at a job fair. But when they finally get around to reading the posting they are turned off by the lack-luster effort to reel-them-in.

If you can sell your jobseekers on the job with a well-written posting your organization will get a huge return on the time you invest. It really doesn't take that much more time to write a great description than one that is average.