Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
OK, so maybe a recruiter gets out a really good job posting. They may have written it themselves, had someone else do it, had a team effort, whatever. Either way it stands out from the bland, bullet-pointed nightmare of most job postings.
Then it doesn’t work.
See, here’s a terrible irony, a job posting that is well-written, clear, concise, perfect can still fail colossally – and you may not know why.
Let’s put this simply – most job postings are horribly written, boring, inaccurate, and usually are near-meaningless laundry lists of stats and years of experience. Those that aren’t too long are usually stupidly short. The end result is:
In short, job postings are lousy and they don’t get the right people.
Who’s to blame? Actually, there’s really no one to blame for this – it’s another case of the system breaking down.
Let’s get this out of the way now – the entire system of recruiting, hiring, and placing people is terribly, terribly broken. You probably noticed this, but I’m just going to confirm you’re right.
There’s specific ways that its broken – indeed I’ll be covering them – but it’s important to understand right now it does not work right. People need work, there is at least some work out there, and a lot goes unfilled, goes wrongly filled, and good jobs and good people vanish into the either.
I base this on the fact that pretty much everyone I talk to about recruiting tells me this, often followed by a litany of reasons why. There’s a weird, almost pathological consensus out there that things aren’t working in getting people into jobs. What makes it weird is that by now we’re terribly used to it, despite it being a rather large social/economic malfunction.