News and Analysis

The Recruiting Nightmare #2 – No One Can Write A Job Posting

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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:

  1. People ignore the postings and send in resumes anyway, qualified or not.
  2. People don’t send in resumes.

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.

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Let’s Get Travelling

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So Google has bought the Frommers brand.

This makes sense to me.  Google has assorted travel-related things (well, maps), it consolidates ratings, and of course having Frommers involved gives them more advertising opportunities.  Also it keeps them out of other people’s hands (perhaps, Yahoo).

This has made me think about Yahoo’s future with advertising, since that’s well, their big thing.

Really there’s a point where people get tired of advertising.  But advertising that can be so integrated into information isn’t advertising.  Google is innovative.

So I wonder if Google at some point, in a viable area (say, travel) is going to really get experimental with advertising.  Offer so much the advertising is invisible, integrated, helpful.  Frommers would be a great addition to any travel site, but also, amusingly, a way to further blur the lines . . .

Just theorizing.

Also theorizing what jobs other future integrations could bring.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

The Recruiting Nightmare #1 – The System is Broken

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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.

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