We’ve all seen the same tired and unimaginative language that’s been used in a million other job ads. People think that’s the way it should be done. So, they repeat the meaningless adjectives, clichés and empty words in their own ads, parrot-fashion. Pollyfiller Parroting the same old rubbish that every other recruiter spouts.
Weasels are sneaky. They write things that don’t really mean anything, but sound as though they do. Things like “one of the best…” or ”market leading…” The 2nd worst kind of weasels are those that work in recruitment. The kind that have been in the industry for about an hour and a half and want …
Do you know why job boards tell recruiters to stuff their job ads with certain keywords and phrases? It’s to boost their own Google ranking for that particular set of words. The higher the job board’s Google ranking, the more likely that job board are going to attract more recruiters to spend money with them, …
“Human being needed. Must be able to speak and listen. Some experience in marketing would be desirable.” Run that job ad and how many applications do you think you’d get? Enough that, if you read them all, you’d be kept very busy. If we pull back from that particular nightmare scenario, describing your ideal candidate …
What’s really going on in the minds of recruiters who type out the words “this is an exciting job opportunity” then post what is essentially just a job description? Are they expecting their target candidates to pore over long, boring content that has hardly any paragraph breaks to find little nuggets of information that might …
The age of the bot probably started back in the early 2000s. That was when job boards became a thing and it was cheap to post hundreds of ads that were just cut-and-pastes of the clients’ job descriptions. Then, whenever a fresh-faced graduate embarked on their career as a Talent Acquisition Consultant, on day one …
“Bullets are easier to read”, they said. “The reader needs to know ALL the job requirements so they can decide whether to apply for the job”, they said. “They”, more often than not, are a marketing intern. Someone whose only other work experience was selling discount bedroom furniture and who are now working for a …
Recycling plastic is good. When people regularly see you doing it, they’re gradually buying into the notion that you’re a good person who cares about the planet. Recycling clichés is bad. When people regularly see you doing this, they’re buying into the notion that you’re just like all those recruiters they’ve had bad experiences with. …
What would an excitable Accountant look like? Someone who wets their pants when they see a profit-and-loss report? What about a passionate Project Manager? Someone who gets hot under the collar about Gannt charts? Is that really the kind of applicant you want? No, of course not. Those kinds of people are probably a bit …
If candidates ever see a job advert that uses the term “the incumbent”, they should run, click away, swipe left. Companies who talk like this hate them. They treat their staff as the great unwashed. They think they’re doing the world a favour by having a job vacancy. Their HR department is probably still called …