Your job advertisements are the worst!

Yesterday I was reading a great job posting for a Dragon Slayer at a friends company. It had me laughing on a day when I received seven bullet points describing in very sparse detail, what a skilled professional does at a potential client’s company. Considering that firms that delivered on recruiting have 3.5 times the growth and 2 times the profit margin of other companies, how can any business put such little effort into their job advertisements?
The truth is no one will tell owners, Managers or HR that their job description or job advertisements suck. I haven’t said those words in 15 years of recruiting, and despite having written terrible advertisements, no one has ever told me when one of mine sucks, but after this post I am sure some will!
We need to stop ignoring horrible job postings and job descriptions and work hard on improving them. Asking how we can make improvements, from our top performers, asking candidates who applied what interested in the role and what did not. Gather feedback and make improvements on job advertisements needs to be a regular process.
The client who made the inquiry was looking for Manufacturing industry skilled workers, where the average production worker’s output produces $529,900 in goods a year! The role with 7 bullet points is responsible for increasing the production capacity of whole productions lines, so these individuals could be worth millions per year in increased revenue.
As recruiters and HR professionals we need to ask better questions of our internal and external clients, to help us improve our job advertisements. We need to send them to our managers for input, call them to walk through why each line is there and make improvements. We also need to be able to give and receive frequent criticism to help our clients become the benchmark for recruitment advertising.
Let me know your criticism of this blog! Thank you for reading.