Why Your Job Ads Are not Delivering Results

Lots of organizations make lots of hires from advertising on job boards. I know we do. Yes, we have a world-class candidate research team, but we still find a reasonable number of great candidates from posting on job boards. So relax, this post is not another “death of the job boards” rant.

Most employers waste money on job boards by ignoring the math.  Last month we had an average of 496 people read each job ad we posted, and 30% of them applied (150 on average).  That’s about normal for us, our ad views vary from 500 to 700 per month and our “view to apply” ratio varies between 27% to 34% month to month.

So, assuming you are looking for the same kinds of candidates we are (big assumption) if you are running ads that don’t get as many viewers (readers), or if you are getting a lower than 30% response rate, then you paid the same advertising rate that we did, but harvested less value for your dollar. In other words, you threw away your money by crafting and an ad that did not perform for you.  So let’s look at why our ad might have outperformed yours.

The likely culprits are:

• You ran a title in your ads that is not a common title among your candidates.  (This will result in nobody clicking to view your ad).
• You wrote a dull ad. You probably just posted the job description. (This will result in a low application ratio)
• You required a cover letter and salary history from everyone. (This will result in a low application ratio)
• You asked the candidate to submit a business plan or jump through some other hoop in order to apply. You did this to save yourself time screening resumes, and winnow out the less serious people, but what you really did was make all the busy people (with other options) opt out.
• Online, you make a terrible first impression. You have no online presence of any kind, just a dated website. You ignore LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Candidates cannot get a sense of who you are–you are digitally anonymous. (This will lower the application ratio from the best and most marketable candidates, who have options).
• And finally, you make it really hard to apply. Research shows that 34 percent of candidates who try to apply for jobs don’t complete the application process – simply because the application process is too much of a hassle.

Beware of any barrier you construct between you and the most marketable  candidates.

Why I Don’t Care About Cover Letters

On the first day of a new search I am often handed a giant stack of resumes. “There are the 300 people who applied to our ad” some exhausted, disgusted hiring manager says. “And how many resumes did you like?” I ask sweetly.  ”These three” says the hiring manager.

Often the hiring manager has ruled out anyone who did not follow instructions and provide a cover letter.  ”If they did not care enough to follow instructions, I’m not interested in them.”  But of course 297 of 300 people never even got an acknowledgement to their resume, so asking each of them to spend an hour crafting a good cover letter seems a tad unfair.  And candidates have long since learned that applying to an ad is a long shot at best. So how does it make any sense that each of them should spend an hour crafting a cover letter that will probably never be read? Basic fairness dictates that you ask for a writing sample only after you are interested in them.

I’m astonished how many companies insist that candidates demonstrate the highest standards of interview decorum, while the employer casually disregards their obligation to do the same.

If you want better candidates, it’s best to remove the barriers to applying.

When we reach out to recruit candidates who are not currently looking, all we ask is for them to schedule a phone call with us – easy peasy.

And when we run ads we don’t ask for a cover letter. Heck, we don’t even require people to apply online (which takes two minutes on our site) – they can simply click a button and email us their resume. Does that create a bit more work for us to upload resumes for people? Yes. Do we have to sent out a few more acknowledgement and rejection letters? Sure. Do we have to plow through a few more bad resumes? You bet. But our ads draw far more highly qualified people than the employers who make candidates jump through hoops.

Which is kind of the whole point of advertising.

Cliches and Buzzwords in Your Job Descriptions

One of the hardest things I do every day is to turn dull job descriptions into clear, concrete, interesting descriptions of a job–something that a busy candidate can skim quickly and make a decision about. As in “Yup, that sounds like a job I’d love” or “Huh uh, that’s not for me.”

Clearly John Sumser agrees:

“Understanding how to write the right job ad for a particular job board is the most expensive part of online recruiting.”

One thing that makes it my writing more difficult is my love for reading. I devour business books magazines, and blogs every day–so I absorb 10 times the recommended daily allowance of buzzwords. If there were a 12-step program for management buzzwords, I’m sure my friends would have enrolled me by now. In fact, they would have staged an intervention.

That’s why this video hit home for me, I hope you enjoy it:

Sorry Craigslist. You’ve Become Our Most Expensive Source of Candidates

Ahh, Craigslist, you seemed like such a bargain at $25 per ad. For years we happily said “Hey, what could it hurt? Let’s run an ad on Craigslist … it’s only $25!” But we just did our 6 month analysis and found that Craigslist was our highest cost recruiting method. Is that counter-intuitive? You bet. But that’s why we run the numbers.

As an executive search firm, our deliverable is a slate of six highly qualified candidates. If the slate-of-six is right, then who gets hired from within that slate is essentially random, and based on so many factors that it’s irrelevant to track the source of actual hire. If five candidates came from target recruiting, but the one who got the job came from a Craigslist ad, we don’t give Craigslist 100% of the credit as the source of hire. Instead we give the recruiting team credit for five finalists, and Craigslist credit for one. We call it “Cost per finalist.”

To determine the Cost per Finalist, we tally up the cost of the ad (In this case $25), the cost of having someone post it, the cost of processing the resumes in response to the ad, the cost of sending acknowledgement letters, the cost of reviewing each resume, the cost of responding to candidate questions (“What’s the status of my application?”) and the cost of sending rejection letters. Admittedly, our costs on the candidate service side might run a bit higher than yours because we want to be really candidate-service oriented, but you get the idea. (For example: We almost never make people apply through our Applicant Tracking System–too many great people drop out).

So when we tally the total cost of processing Craigslist candidates against the number that actually made it into the slate-of-six, Craigslist came in at just over $1,800 in direct costs per finalist. Bear in mind, this does not include any of the indirect costs of running the company. The $1,800 does not include a penny for telephones, computer systems, profit, or anything.

So I’m sorry Craigslist, we just cannot afford to work with you anymore. We do wish you all the best in your future endeavors, and we’ll refer our friends when they want to sell a futon or something.

The Perfect (Resume) is the Enemy of the Good (Hiring Process)

Nothing is more damaging to a good hiring process than the perfect resume.   Once a hiring manager gets it in his mind that a resume needs to look a certain way, any deviation from that mental picture is punished with apathy.  As in: “Eh, I don’t want to interview that person.” 

The perfect resume (if that unicorn ever does arrive) causes everyone to get excited before the interview.   Expectations are sky high.  “This guy looks like a perfect fit!”  Right up until they open their mouth.   As they say ”Light travels faster than sound, that’s why most people seem bright until you hear them speak.”   

So how can you overcome the good resume/bad candidate, bad resume/ good candidate problem? 

An HR manager told me her guilty secret this week.   After she takes her first pass thru the giant stack-o’-resumes that her job board ads generate, she is often unimpressed with the “A” resume candidates during the interviews.  So then she goes through the whole stack again, looking at the “B” resume candidates – who often do better than the “A” resume candidates in the interviews.  But here is the fun part.   She told me that she does not get discouraged until she takes a THIRD pass through all the resumes, because it is often the candidates with “C” resumes who interview the best!

This dovetails with my experience.   We carefully guard against “perfect-resume bias” in our hiring process (see “You Got All That From Reading the Resume?  Really?“)   Consequently fully a third of our placements come from candidates that our clients initially resisted interviewing based on resume alone.  

But seriously, we don’t read all the resumes we got from a job board ad three times.  Nobody deserves that kind of punishment.

It Ain’t What You Say, It’s the Way That You Say It

When you introduce your organization to a prospective employee, what do you tell them?  You say more than you realize with your choice of language for the ad (dull job description or interesting ad copy), how you get the word out (social media, job board, or networking through friends), how you have people apply (excruciating online application or just email a resume).   

If you doubt me for a second, I’ll prove it.  Here are three other ways I could make the same point to you: 

First Grammy-winning composer Billy May:

“It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it
It ain’t what you do it’s the time that you do it
It ain’t what you do it’s the place that you do it
And that’s what gets results”

Second, one of HR’s most respected bloggers – Kris Dunn: 

There’s opportunity to differentiate in every job on the planet by thinking more like a marketer, and HR and Recruiting have more opportunity than most.

Finally, and most concisely, William Zinsser, who said  “Writing is thinking on paper.” 

Now,  just observe how each of the three messages affected you.   Which one got the point across best? 

I’m not saying you need to use YouTube clips, or quote respected authorities, or write with the clarity of William Zinsser, but you do need to recognize the impact of each choice on your target audience. 

Any way you say it, candidates can tell in seconds just how much thinking you put into your recruiting efforts, and they’ll respond accordingly.

Failure to Communicate – Overused Words

Be very careful what you ask for, or you just may get it.  Almost two years ago, I wrote a post “Bad Job Ads Attract only Desperate Candidates” and I pointed out some really common (boring) words in job descriptions that are not only useless, they are the kind of words that suck all the oxygen out of the room when you use them.  Candidates don’t know precisely what you mean when you use them – so they actually detract from your message.  

Now I find that our friends at LinkedIn have done the same thing…but with the most overused words in resumes.   (Their list is below)  Note how closely the lists match up! Apparently candidates have learned to play back all those meaningless job description words in their resumes.   Hilarious.

LinkedIn’s most overused resume words:

• Innovative
• Dynamic
• Motivated
• Extensive Experience
• Results Oriented
• Proven Track Record
• Team Player
• Fast Paced
• Problem Solver
• Entrepreneurial

My two year old list of overused job description words:

• Dynamic (found in 22,000 local ads) 
• Hands On  (found in 12,000 local ads)
• Motivated (found in 10,000 local ads) 
• Fast Paced (found in 9,000 local ads)
• Exciting (found in 8,000 local ads) 
• Team Player (found in 4,000 local ads)  
• Self-Starter (found in 4,000 local ads)

So, if you use dull words in your job descriptions, I suppose you have no right to complain about all those dull resumes you receive….right?

How to Give a Really Bad First Impression of Your Company

You know the drill.  You post a job ad and 300 people apply.  You know, at best,  there are five qualified people in that stack of resumes, so what’s the fastest way to find them?   Some employers ask job seekers to jump through a hoop before committing any time to them.   The hoop  might involve a pre-employment test, performing a work-related task like writing something, or even asking something really time consuming like developing a business plan in order to apply for a job. 

Except here is the problem.

It’s rude.  

And it drives away many of the most talented people you really want to talk to. 

By asking for something before you have committed anything you convey that your time is worth more than theirs … that they are just one of thousands and you are too busy to talk to them.   Except top performers don’t see themselves as mindless drones, as one of thousands.  And remember, there were, at most, only five of them in that big stack of resumes -  but in your haste to save time, you just gave those five the same bad experience you gave everyone else. 

Think about how you feel when a company treats you that way.   I went to Home Depot this weekend, only because my local hardware store was already closed.  I detest going to any retailer who is not staffed and managed appropriately to deliver actual customer service.  Heck, even the self-checkout process was poorly designed.  Sure, they got my money, but it was frustrating and dehumanizing … just like the first impression you are making on everyone who answered your ad.  

Don’t misunderstand me.  It is smart to ask for extra information, it’s even a great idea to test people, but please mind your manners and do those things only AFTER you have first spoken with them.   After you have spoken with someone, you are welcome to ask for something else.  To save time, I think a phone interview makes a lot of sense.

OK, so if  my “mind your manners” rant was not compelling enough for you … Steve Boese wrote a great post on your real first impression with job seekers.  No, it’s not your offices – it’s your web presence and what people say about you.  It’s what happens long before they apply to your ad.   Google is your first impression, followed by your website, corporate job site, and then what other people who interviewed with you reported about their experience.  (InsideJob on Facebook for example). 

If your hiring process feels like shopping at Home Depot, these experiences will surely make their way into the online conversation about your company.  Then your first impression on Google will be working against you, and your recruiting problems will grow ever larger. 

Oh, and forget about those 5 good people, they all dropped out long before you got around to interviewing.

How to Solve Your Recruiting Problems Long-Term (but it won’t be easy)

You pay to post jobs on a job board, but then you don’t like the candidate pool.  You pay more to search the resume databases of the job boards, but you still don’t find anyone you actually want to hire.  Search firms incessantly cold-call you,  offering to fill your jobs for a fee of 30% of annual salary, but you can’t afford that, and besides, you really wonder if they aren’t just sending you the same people you saw on the job boards.  So how do you break out of the vicious cycle?   How do you solve your recruiting problems long term and break fee of the cycle of job board disappointment?

You turn to Seth Godin.  His post on the reality of new media is so simple it’s revolutionary.  Admittedly, his post discusses marketing and never mentions recruiting, but when you read it you’ll see exactly what I mean:

• In marketing, we used to “rent” an audience from old media companies (TV networks).  In recruiting, the old media giants are not TV networks, but job boards like Monster.     And of course, when you “rent” an audience, you don’t have to treat it very well (just like a rental car).  Who cares what happens to the portion of the audience you were not interested in?  No sense even sending them a rejection letter, right?  You’ll never talk to them again…
• But in new media, you don’t have to rely on someone else’s disgruntled, beat up, poorly maintained rental audience.  You go direct.  You build your very own private communications channel and invite the good people there.  It’s yours, so you invest in them, lavish attention on them with a Facebook fan page,  Twitter account and maybe even a job seeker blog.  You show them what it’s like to work for you with videos.   (Check out  The Sodexo job seeker blog, RSM McGladrey on Youtube, and Comscore on Twitter) .
• As you invest and your audience grows, you eventually bypass the job boards entirely because you have attracted an audience of candidates on your own.  You started your own conversation.  You built your own community, and because you treated them right, they are eager to hear from you. 
• It’s cheap, but it’s not fast and it’s not easy.  It’s an investment, but the benefits are yours and yours alone.  And when you invest in building and maintaining a platform – your own media channel – you will have a powerful, sustainable competitive advantage over the “renters” who have to share someone else’s audience.  Your community of people wouldn’t dream of looking there for a job – they have you.   

One recent study showed that job seekers spend an average of 5 hours a week on social media sites each week.   Another study showed that internet users overall have tripled the percentage of time they spend on social network and blogging sites just since last year.  Clearly the time for action is right now.

So here’s the real question.  The tools exist, the audience is ready.  Do you want to solve your recruiting problems and gain the first mover advantage now by building your own channel?  Or do you want to keep renting and be shackled to that familiar recruiting problem for just a little while longer?

Are Job Boards Dead, or Are Your Job Ads Just Deadly Dull?

Look around and you’ll see quite a bit of debate about the ”death of job boards.”  Many question the hefty prices they charge, saying that  free is the wave of the future for job boards.  Some question whether they attract great candidates - here, here, here and here for example.   I’ve certainly been bitterly disappointed by the performance of some job boards in Washington, feeling my money was completely wasted. 

Similarly, candidates often feel like their time is wasted reading job boards.

But the great job board debate often overlooks one big thing - the ads themselves. Rarely do I see recruiters ask a different question.  “What would make our recruitment advertising more effective?”  

Recruitment Advertising Executive Jeff Perry just did that in his post on ERE.  Here are two key points:

• Five times more people read the headline than read the ad – meaning, your lead-in matters.  Jeff says you have about 10 seconds to capture your reader’s attention (but I think he overstates that by about 9 seconds)
• Think about what the tone of your ad conveys about your company – serious, committed, playful, creative -what?  (Just a guess here, but right now, it probably conveys that you are pretty dull because you are probably using the soul crushing language of the job description).

Job boards are not dead (not yet anyway).  While many are simply awful, we have a few that we find are consistently cost effective.  I know for a fact that you can judiciously use job boards to your advantage for very cost effective recruiting.  You just can’t be dull.

For more on what you can do, see my previous post bad ads attract bad candidates, and the companion post: good job advertising gives you leverage. 

What has your experience been?  Have you given up on the job boards entirely or are they still working for you?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Hiring in Washington DC

New clients often ask me why recruiting great people in Washington DC remains stubbornly difficult.   One of my favorite job aggregator sites – Indeed - explains why in a very simple graphic that compares unemployed people relative to job postings.   (9/15/09 Note:  Indeed updated this chart recently).

Washington and Baltimore have 1 job posting for every unemployed person.  This is the best performance of any major city listed.  Other cities,  like New York have a ratio of 2 unemployed people for every job posting.  But poor Detroit comes in last with eighteen unemployed people for every job posting.  

The graphic illustrates that recruiting is essentially a local business.  Hiring difficulty varies widely from city to city.

By the way, it’s also a good reminder, that if you want to hire better people (at least in Washington), you have to write a better job ad.  Something I have been ranting talking about for quite some time.

Why is the DC Job Market so Irritating?

Employers - here’s more bad news:  The DC job market is showing signs of returning to “normal.”  While hiring for some jobs is easier now, “normal” for DC means that employers will have an increasingly difficult time finding highly qualified people to fill every critical opening.   

The daily drumbeat of bad economic news that has pummeled us all since November is slowly letting up.   Government recovery plans are taking shape, and government money will soon be flowing (yea!)   Layoff notices are not coming quite so quickly.   And a once in a generation hiring opportunity is slowly beginning to slip away from you.  You are now missing one of the best chances to upgrade your workforce that you may ever experience.

I know hiring managers find this hiring difficulty both astonishing and really, really irritating.  They want to upgrade to better people, they really do, but most just don’t know how.   HR professionals (who are often short-staffed themselves) are hearing managers bitterly complain about their internal recruiting efforts:   

“Are you kidding me?  In the midst of the worst recession in twenty five years, we can’t find better candidates than this?”

“I can’t believe I have to pay a search fee in a recession?  Seriously.  Where are the good people?”

“Are you telling me that we received 300 resumes from our ad on Monster and only three are worth interviewing?”

So why didn’t this huge financial calamity, this Near Great Depression, this global fiasco make hiring easier for ALL of us here in DC? 

Well the recession did make hiring easier, if you were looking for people to work in Detroit.  Or if you were looking for construction workers, auto workers, or Wall Street types.  But you aren’t looking for those people, now are you?  No, you are looking for the same skills everyone else is, and those skills are still in relatively short supply, because very few firms in our area had big  layoffs of people with really hard-to-find skills.  (Circular logic, I know, but it’s still true.)

So what evil forces are conspiring against your recruiting efforts?   Why are you still missing out on this once-in-a-generation hiring opportunity? 

First, don’t confuse national unemployment rates with local unemployment rates.  We are deeply fortunate to work in the strongest job market in the country - our unemployment rates for most occupations never really spiked.  But to take it a step further, don’t confuse the macro unemployment rate with the number of highly qualified job seekers who have the skills you need to thrive in a recession.   It’s a darn shame that thousands of unemployed auto workers don’t make it easier for you to hire your next CFO, but they don’t.

 Second, “post and pray” job advertising does not work any better now than it did before - you just get 300 desperate unqualified people instead of 100 or 150.  Sure you get a few gems in there, but not as many as you would expect, given that everyone tells us this is the worst economy they have ever seen. 

But the biggest reason you are not seeing great people lining up to take your jobs, is you haven’t thought enough about who you want to hire yet.   When you post a job without first taking the time to think hard about it, everybody who reads your ad can tell right away.  And the person you want?  That hard charging, no excuses, high achieving, go-getter who gets results in a recession?  They are results oriented, so when they know you are not seriously thinking about your business, they do not even apply.

In the past few weeks I have had a dozen clients tell me the same thing, almost verbatim:  ”We’ve been trying to hire someone on our own for several months now, and with the economy so bad, I really expected we would have filled it, but all I’m doing is sifting through resumes and nobody jumps out at me – I just don’t have time for this and I can’t afford to leave this critical position unfilled any longer. 

Hey DC, welcome back to your “normal” irritatingly familiar ways.

Reaching Candidates with Social Media

Are you incorporating social media into your recruiting efforts?  Smart use of social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) might be the key to improving your results and reducing your costs.  And new options are emerging almost daily.

60% of Baby Boomers are avid consumers of social media like blogs and forums – up from 40% last year.   Almost 25% are active in social networks, up from 15% last year.  For insight beyond the stats, read Jeremiah Owyang’s article about How Baby Boomers Use Social Media. 

When CPA Trendlines surveyed where CPAs spend time online, Facebook was a huge favorite.  CPA adoption of social media is astonishing, and I wonder if it is equally true for many other professions who generally hire introverts, like engineers.  (Please excuse the gross over-generalization there, just asking a question).

Social networking site Plaxo, has recently formed a partnership with SimplyHired.

And LinkedIn Groups now has free job postings.

I’d like to note that every article I just referenced was sourced from Twitter.  So is Twitter a waste of time?  Perhaps, but not for me.  I find it to be a very effective way to stay current with the rapidly changing recruiting landscape.   Hmm, now I just wonder how will I find time to see which of these new options work best for my clients… 

So how do you plan to use the power of social media to reduce your recruiting costs, improve your relationships with qualified candidates, and build your employment brand?

10 Suggestions for the Job Seeker

My niece’s roommate was a miserable, depressed,  unemployed, self-absorbed wretch of a recent college graduate.  Slept till noon, never left the apartment, never saw friends.   Then a couple weeks ago she “caved” and took an unpaid internship in her field.  Got up early, got dressed, went out in the world and did some work.   Within days, her mood brightened, she made some new friends and reconnected with old ones.  She reengaged with life.  So yeah, work matters.  And while you are looking for work, you need to find ways to engage and connect with others . . . and there are A LOT of new ways to do that.

I’ve been there.  Looking for work is scary, lonely, emotionally draining and can feel much harder than actually working.   It’s inefficient, uncertain, and there is no guarantee of success (just like, you know, having a job in these turbulent times).

But if you are a job seeker listen up.  I talk to A LOT of you.  And almost all of you make at least two serious mistakes when you look for work.  You either expect recruiters to find you a job, or you expect your friends to sympathize with you  and agree with you that your approach to job hunting is fine.  Both expectations are wrong.   

First, please realize that search firms don’t exist to help people find jobs, we exist to help companies find self-reliant people.   Heck, even career counselors don’t exist to help you find a job – they exist to teach you the skills you need to find a job on your own.  Most people are simply terrible at looking for work, and even if you did it before, the way to look for work now is different than it was before.  It’s not just about resumes and cover letters and meeting people for lunch and coffee to network – you need to do MORE. 

Your approach to job search is NOT fine, and I won’t tell you it is.   I will, however, happily share with you some tools and resources you need now, to help you on your path toward self-reliance.  If you take these actions, I will be terribly impressed with you and absolutely delighted to help you in any way I can.    So here are my top 10 suggestions: 

Slash Your Recruiting Costs AND Your Turnover

When was the last time your job advertising eliminated 80% of your employee turnover? 

I’ve written about how bad job ads tend to attract only desperate candidates, wasting your time and money.   But let’s face it – candidates from job boards still fill a lot of your open jobs.  So for most companies, improving the performance of your recruitment advertising will have an outsized impact on your ability to attract top performers, control your recruiting costs, and hold down the cost of employee turnover.  

When I refer to the ”performance” of your advertising  I am not referring to how many resumes you get – more is not necessarily better, and often worse.  No, I’m referring to your ability to reliably, predictably recruit the calibre of people you need, exactly when you need them, at the lowest possible cost.

Great ads give you leverage – once they work,  you can use them over and over again, keeping your candidate pipeline full, and dramatically reducing your downtime (time-to-fill) between hires. 

We helped one of our clients eliminate agency fees, cut employee turnover 80% in a critical job, and build a very low cost candidate pipeline for people with specialized skills. . . simply by improving their online advertising:

• Turnover in the position in 2006 was 27 people. 
• Turnover in the position in 2007 was 21 people. 
• We developed and ran the new ad for them in late 2007, resulting in 5 hires from the initial slate of of 8 candidates.  The client then ran the ad on their own a few times in 2008, resulting in an additional 5 hires. (10 hires that year from the same ad). 
• Turnover in the position in 2008 was just 5 people – an 80% reduction.   Also, agency fees in 2008 were eliminated. 
• Managers who formerly lived in fear of turnover are finally free to manage employee performance courageously,  knowing with certainty that if someone is not working out, they can be replaced quickly and at low cost.   

That’s the kind of leverage smart online outreach can give you.