Honest Labour
Posted by Mitch on 8th December 2015
When it comes to choosing their next job, I think there’s one thing above all else that matters to most people.
And that one thing is the work.
What does the job entail doing?
Who with?
What are the challenges?
What needs to be improved?
Who else is impacted when the job is done well?
What will they learn?
These are the things that people care about when they look for a job and so ought to be the drivers of what’s in recruitment adverts.
Not the company’s often over-inflated opinion of itself.
Not the funky hot-desking office environment.
And not the host of other incidental hygiene-factors that drive most attempts at creative recruitment communications that I see. Recruitment ads that are often little more than half-baked derivations of “We’re a really awesome place to work!”
If a company talks about each of their vacancies enthusiastically and honestly (and I appreciate that those two adverbs aren’t natural bedfellows) and fills them with people for whom the job represents some kind of logical career evolution, pretty much everything else would probably fall into place.
Because it’s only ever really about the work.
If that’s boring, unfulfilling or just plain unpleasant, no amount of ergonomic office furniture, Friday afternoons in the pub or even the stature of the company is going to make the job enjoyable – at least not in the long-term. Think Amazon, if the recent publicity about their work practices are to be believed.
So, if we accept that people care most about what they’d be doing more than who they’d be doing it for, how do we produce recruitment communications that are more likely to get the right types of response?
Here are my suggestions:
1. Be realistic about what those jobs are. What’s good and what’s not so good about them. Don’t be afraid to reveal the not so good. It could save you and the candidate a lot of time later.
2. Put some effort into how and where you broadcast them. Use a copywriter. Or a recruiter who knows how to use copywriters. Or a recruiter who knows how to write job ads.
3. Fill them with people who can and want to do those jobs, for the right reasons. In my experience, the best type of candidate is the one who has something to prove.
Get those 3 things right and I reckon you’ve got yourself the basis of a recruitment model that can make the business sustainable, serve its customers well, grow and make money.
That’s assuming the people running that business aren’t sociopaths who think they’re doing the world a favour just by having job vacancies.
Start pitching your jobs in the right way to the right people – and the right people are usually those people who can do the job and have valid reasons for wanting to do the job.
Usually, the biggest reason people want to do another job is because it’s more of a challenge than the one they’re doing now.
Recruitment isn’t rocket science.
Unless you’re hiring for NASA. Then it is rocket science.