We have all gone to a job board to find ONE company that has posted several jobs (sometime as many as 20 or more) back to back to back. I guess they thought that they would create a buzz and capture more interest from more people with more ads. Well I am here to tell you that you are actually creating the exact opposite reaction than you are intending to generate.

45% of candidates we surveyed said that they are actually LESS LIKELY to apply to a company when their ads appear with frequency and in great numbers. The more you advertise – the fewer people will apply. Only 19% of people surveyed said they were more likely to apply when ads appeared frequently or in great numbers. So, that leaves 36% who had no opinion of if it matters or not.

Can you afford to eliminate 45% of potential applicants?

I even worked with a company a few years back who advertised so much they could not get anyone in Canada to apply to their branded ads – so they started putting up “anonymous” ads. To tell you the absolute truth, this only served to upset a lot of candidates and further hurt their reputation as a company that no one wanted to work for. When I did find a suitable candidate, I would lose them when I did disclose the name of my client because news travels fast and their reputation was severely damaged. Not only did thier over advertising limit and finally exhaust all of thier potential applicants, the suitable people that applied to thier "decoy" ads felt duped when they applied and learned who was behind them.

I have talked at length about monitoring and ways to take a “temperature check” of your reputation, but the single quickest way to diminish your company’s reputation as a good employer is to over advertise. Think about it – 1,000’s of people per day see all of your ads and here is what they are thinking:

Man, they must be desperate for people. I don’t want to work there, they must be short staffed and I will have to work lots of extra hours!
Wow, they must be bad people to work for they have been advertising a lot and for a long time and obviously still can’t find anyone.
Well maybe not exactly but you can start to get the point.

There is a difference between creating a presence on job boards and with social media and over advertising and appearing desperate. Be careful because at the end of the day all you have is your reputation! If it is a bad one, IT IS THE SINGLE BIGGEST REASON YOU CAN’T FIND THE RIGHT PEOPLE.