JOBMATCHBOX

There are a lot of people that I talk to who think that there is a secret formula to writing a job description. They read lots of books and study other people’s job descriptions for many hours. Then they strategize about how to game the recruiters who will interpret their jobs and the candidates, all in one job description. What they don’t realize is that the job description is not the same as a job ad. People often confuse the two and much to their disadvantage. You want your job description to carve out what the role entails, but you want your job ad to sell your company, job and team. These are two different things. I think that this is one of the reasons why the big traditional job boards are falling out of favor with job seekers.

To get yourself on the right track if you are in this strategic job description writing camp here are a few simple tips:

Think about your team’s narrative and the audience who you want to attract. Your job ad should spell out what you are about. If your team works really hard and earns big rewards (or expects to upon IPO or acquisition) then talk about it. If your team emphasizes fun and likes to play network games then talk about the games that your team plays and the things that you do for fun. If your team is more likely to have people leave for Harvard Business School then spell this out in your narrative.

Provide visual clues that substantiate your narrative. If your office is a dive, but there are lots of great neighborhood amenities nearby then show the neighborhood in a photo album. If the opposite is true then emphasize what you have going for you on the inside of the office. If you have a lounge with Foosball, Ping Pong, Rock Band, Arcade Games, etc. then put photos of these things in your job ad.

Tie the job ad into your company career website and provide a more detailed job description there. You should expand on the narrative and visual clues that you provide in your job ad on your company website.

It seems like only a few days ago that the guys over at Edgio closed shop and sold out to the highest bidders.  Around the same time Jobster’s CEO jumped ship and moved to New York City.  Today I received tips from multiple sources that Eric Yoon, the CEO of Jobthread has moved on officially resigned.  No word yet on why.  They were partnered with Jobster right around the time that Jobster’s CEO moved to New York.  I can’t help but wonder if this is all happening by chance. 

I’ve been critical of big job boards, but this is out of control.  It’s official, Wal-Mart has entered the online classifieds business.  Does this mean that their next mark is Facebook?  Craigslist eat your heart out.

When I post a job and I get candidates in response who are in high school with three page resumes!  True story.  Seriously, I just spent 3 hours going through resumes from job board listings. 

A few patterns:
More than 80% (my best guess) of the resumes that come in from Craigslist are from spammy job seekers - the kind who don’t include a name, address, or a cover letter indicating which job they are responding to. 

Any time you post an engineering job on Linkedin you will get consultants, project managers, sales reps, and anything but engineers.  Engineers just don’t use LinkedIn to job hunt. 

Engineers DO use Craigslist, but not the ones who you want to talk to.

Job descriptions are for wimps!  I don’t really have time to count, but if I did I’ll bet that 90% of people who respond to jobs DO NOT read the job requirements.  It isn’t that they miss the title, it is that they read the title and skip the rest.  The part that really concerns me is that I’m not even talking about the people who are out there submitting their consultants for jobs manually or by script…I’m talking about the people who just don’t think they need to read the descriptions.  If you are a recruiter and you call one of these people back you should kick yourself.

The longer the resume is the less likely it is that the person is qualified for the job.  It isn’t that more pages is bad or frowned upon, it is a universal signal to hiring teams that you are hiding something (or just can’t find a job so you’ve hedged your bets and applied for all of them).  Don’t worry if you have a 2-3 page resume if you have 10-30 years of experience, but if you have 10 years of experience and 23 pages of resume then you may want to seek professional help (I’m not talking about the resume writer kind either).

At least 30% (again, my best guess) of people responding to jobs online don’t feel that it is important to include their NAME.  At least 60% (”) skip all or part of their last name.  This isn’t just engineers (althought that part really concerns me - aren’t engineers supposed to pay attention to detail?).

Ebay is suing Craigslist and getting sued right back according to Tech Crunch.  I wish I could have a ringside seat for this one.  I can’t help but think that this would not have happened had Craigslist reinvested their profits in their product or service.  If you have ever called into Craigslist then you probably got the same response that I did - a lack of concern for the user.  Sure, they have implemented a lot of changes, but they are making plenty of cash with little more than was in place a few years ago.  At the same time, spam on Craigslist continues to spiral out of control - both poster spam and response spam.  Ebay has built a product that is superior in many ways, but that doesn’t say much because it is Ebay - a company that isn’t exactly the champion of quality either.  Ok, maybe I’m being a little harsh…Ebay helps a lot of people peddle products just like Craigslist so why shouldn’t they work hard to undermine their competition as Craigslist allegest that they have.

At some point back in the Fall I started to get really busy and I stopped writing as much as I had before.  At least that is what I would like to think.  Part of the reason why I stopped posting as much was due to the fact that I wasn’t using job boards any longer so my frustrations with them came to a hault.  So did my inspired posts.  And by inspired posts I mean that I was writing things that prompted a more well known recruiting industry blogger to pull me aside at a conference and ask me if I was on the payroll of some of the job boards that I had written about.  Truth be told, I had been approached by some job boards, but I just didn’t feel like selling out.  Instead I decided to become a consultant to hiring teams looking for help navigating the hiring waters without job boards.  Seven months later I’m still in business and I have new frustrations, but none that have prompted me to write as much as I had about the job board industry.  In fact, I started to think that my job board nightmare had left for good.  Until today.

This morning my tiny staff had every intention of purchasing a job board account to help with the occasional random search that we do that isn’t in our immediate supply chain.  There are just some things that require a rapid response or a broad search that Facebook doesn’t help with or Linkedin doesn’t speed along (waiting for anything - pages to load or responses on Linkedin is like watching paint dry).  Before I knew what had happened, the nightmare was back. 

And by nightmare, I mean…oh, please help me, please don’t make me have to talk to those people again, nooooooooooooooooooooooo!  

If you have been following Jobmatchbox for very long you may recall that I’ve written about the little things that can make a big difference: how easy it would be for big traditional job boards to simply household their databse records so that there are not 10 different people with the same New Jersey Consulting Firm’s main line as their phone number, how nice it would be if I could flag spam on big traditional job boards like I can on Craigslist (Dice took my advice), and so on.  I also talked about the bigger picture and how I can’t stand the fact that job boards play off of negative emotions to get people to impulsively change jobs - the I hate my boss ads come to mind.  I also wrote about the things that job boards did that were shady, like selling accounts to anyone with a credit card number which could potentially facilitate identity theft.  

I secretly contemplated what I would do differently if I were to ever launch my own job board.  Lots of people contacted me for advice on their efforts to do the same.  One of the major job boards tried to hire me.  
 
So today I had to give up my job board fast for long enough to talk to the sales reps from several big traditional job boards.  It was like nails on a chalk board.  They talked really fast or they didn’t listen or both.  At the end of the day I’m thinking that I will continue to be better off without a big traditional job board account.