You can reach me by email, you can reach me by website, you can reach me by mobile phone, but....

...for crying out loud make the content you reach me with worth reading!

Seriously, the more technology advances and, as a result, the easier it becomes for any old Joe to upload content onto a website, the more creativity seems to be going out of the window, particularly in recruitment.

What sparked my latest rant? I read somewhere today that as there are 5 billion mobile phone users in the world it follows that many more people in the coming months and years are going to be searching for jobs via their phone. But what the hell is the point if all they are going to uncover is the same tired old content they can currently read via their PC? Seriously, some of the job content on the web is truly, truly awful. Semi-literate, cut & pasted and littered with typos and spelling mistakes and all the allure of a dead sheep. Never mind the fact that the advertiser comes across as being totally careless and unable to get the basics right, do the owners of these sites not ever consider exercising any kind of editorial control, or are they happy to accept any old content as long as it's legal and the customer pays their bill?

Frankly, some of the jobs you come across online would never have been allowed to appear in the press such is their complete lack of quality/comprehension. They would have been rejected for lowering the standards of the newspaper or periodical they were due to appear in. I've seen jobs starting 'our client are looking', I've also seen ads asking for a 'good telephone manor' plus too many other glaring and childlike errors to mention. What do the people who post all these drab, uninspiring and in some cases totally incomprehensible job ads think a candidate with even the slightest intelligence must think about such content? What sort of impression is it creating about your business, not just with potential candidates but with potential clients too?

Please, before you jump on the mobile bandwagon, take a look at your current job posts. Are they interesting, alluring and enticing or are they simply badly cut and pasted job descriptions or job posts littered with basic errors? I can think of no other area of advertising that treats its advertising with as little thought, care and attention as some recruiters do. Cars, holidays, insurance, alcohol, consumables, food - no, I am trying but none of these are advertised in such a dreadful way as some jobs are.

In short, some recruiters seriously need to raise their game, otherwise all that investment in technology and having a mobile friendly website will all be in vain.

Comment by Tim Spagnola on October 5, 2011 at 11:49am: What a great call to action Alasdair - raise your game, but be smart about it recruiters!

Comment by Sandra McCartt on October 5, 2011 at 12:52pm: Excellent post. The problem is that the same little darlings that are posting those ads are the same ones who are doing the screening interviews of our candidates, reviewing resumes that come to them through their career portals and are the first ones to reject a candidate who has a typo on the resume.

I had a candidate relate a story of an internal telling him he had been rejected because he had two typos in his cover letter. His response, "well, I am sure I should have checked it, but I copied the first few lines of your job posting and pasted in my cover letter".

He said it was one of those frozen moments in time. He asked her if she was going to tell the hiring manager or if he needed to share that. Her response was to tell him that he should have checked as that might happen on the job and they were looking for people who paid a lot of attention to detail.

Go figure.

Comment by Bill Schultz on October 5, 2011 at 1:02pm: The title of this blog put a song in my head:

Comment by Alasdair Murray on October 5, 2011 at 1:08pm: Er, that's what the title of the blog was based on, but, after typing out the first couple of lines of the song, I didn't use the lyrics from it as I remembered that a recruiter I once knew used nine words from a song in an ad was charged £3,000 for copyright infringement :-)

Comment by Bill Schultz on October 5, 2011 at 1:15pm: LOL, You can reach me by law firm......

Comment by Stephanie Bressan on October 6, 2011 at 9:23pm: Hi Alasdair, totally agree!! www.jobezy.com.au is a mobile job board (for Australians). We physically take the long ad and "SMS" it (although we now have mobile email alerts too with the full vacancy information). HOWEVER, there are 2 issues: job seekers still expect to see a format they are comfortable with (to some degree) so qualitative and quantitative information is still paramount, AND you can lead a horse to water... in the end, the advertiser is the one who writes the words, no matter how much we try to help them!

Comment by Francois Guay on October 9, 2011 at 4:48pm: Great post. I agree that too many employers and recruiters do not spend enough time developing a proper ad, the technology will not add any value here...just spread more crap.

Comment by Ivan Stojanovic on October 11, 2011 at 6:28am: Nice post, nice song, nice and honest rant,.. Like it!

Well – this is actually that – quality content. So thumbs
up! You practice what you preach!