“We hire a secretary as assistant manager. The perfect age is 20. The minimum experience requirement is 30 years.“
Two professional categories might be interested in this article. The first is, of course, the beneficiaries of the Job Announcement. The other is Job Publishing Providers.
The purpose of publishing a job announcement is to get a message from the emitter to the receiver. Pretty simple, huh? In theory, yes. But let’s keep in mind the definition.
For the HR specialist
Now, you should have a clear way of communicating right to the target.
Let me put some questions for you, the HR manager conducting the Advertising for Recruiting:
Where is the future employee of your organization spending time? How much time?
What does he read? Where? When? How much?
What are the best methods of getting his or her attention? Keep in mind everyone these days masters the channels through which information is filtered.
What would be the most straightforward, fastest, easiest path between your message and the future employee?
What are the values of the employee? Then, use them as keywords in your message.
What patterns of thinking, behaving, and talking make your future employee observable? Speak his or her language.
What are the most prolific pathways of finding employees in the past?
What are the ways other people in the industry obtain better employees? Find them, use them.
What does the employment message say about you?
What questions does your ad answer?
What is the promise that your ad makes? You have the responsibility towards your future employees and other candidates to provide a correct image of your company through the announcement.
What differentiates your message from the competition?
All these seem like very Advertising-oriented questions. But unfortunately, some deluded themselves into thinking HR is all you must know to do an HR job. Wrong. But be patient. You can count on the fact that adversaries who know to create proper messages for future employees will steal the best employees you dream of.
Another aspect you must pay attention to is the development and the creation of your Organization’s Brand as an Employer. Is this vision in accord with the organization’s brand and its development? Is there a coherent story beyond the brand?
Keeping in attention this aspect might be the difference between attracting prestige and making a fool of yourself. Beware that even people might not tell you in the face: “You are incompetent” count on the fact that your mistakes will be remembered by your employers, your employees, your HR fellows, and your competition. Getting employees is one of your most public actions as an HR specialist.
Communication is the area of expertise for both the HR person and the advertiser. The difference is that the advertiser communicates to large audiences for a living most of the time, in contrast to the HR person, who especially manages internal communication. The HR specialist would undoubtedly be better at consulting with an external communication specialist before publishing anything related to the company’s image, even for those announcements where the company is not specified.
To all this, keep in mind the promotion provider has no obligation to give you advice on distributing your message towards different channels; it can simply take the news as is and deliver it.
The ad distributor
Whether it may happen through an Advertising Agency, or through an HR Consulting Company, or through a media agency, or a campaign designed and executed in-house, the ad distributor has the responsibility of providing a good message for the customer. Of course, the ad buyer might give an improper ad. If this fails, it will come again and again to publish other ads. But in the end, this becomes associated with a bad experience, and someone will think of cutting down some costs at a particular moment. This means no more money for an ad provider. To a certain extent, this is a “do to others like you want to be done to you.” Finding new customers for job ads might be as soliciting for an ad distributor as finding suitable employees for the customers run by the agencies.
Of course, in a moment of market development, you can count on the request surpassing the offer. But someone who builds a business around a trend is not an authentic businessman but an opportunist.
It can’t hurt to position yourself as a full-service provider, having a few consultants customize the client’s message. Sometimes, this is reduced to using old templates, like a mercenary and not as a self-respecting services provider. Companies that appreciate efficiency will become attracted by your services if you provide affordable success rates rather than coming again and again out of HR specialists’ incapability of formulating a targeted message.
In some moments, other organizations’ stupidity might work as insurance for what you’re doing, but how long can you succeed by counting on others’ stupidity? Wouldn’t it make more sense to differentiate yourself by offering success by creating the best service on the market?
Copyright © Marcus Victor Grant 2012-present, all rights reserved.
The materials on this blog are subject to this disclaimer.
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