Just recently the issue of cutting and pasting a job description into a job board to become an advertisement came to the fore in the UK when an IT Recruitment Consultancy inadvertently did just this except they left in a “sentence”: ‘Minimum six years of experience in IT . . . The person should be a UK citizen with security clearance from the UK Government. Preferably of Indian origin.’

This was then picked up and the story went from local newspaper to a national and the TV, not great PR!. Plus a $38k fine for the trouble

The company admited ‘It should not have been put up, and was cut and pasted from material sent to us by a client in India.’

Accepted this is an extreme example and is defiantly not the norm – just unlucky you might say BUT the practice is the norm and the result is that job seekers see a job description i.e. a list of duties not a well crafted advertisement which sell the job, the culture and the company.

Poor job advertisements, fake jobs etc all result in a poor job seeking experience and for the job boards a major problem – jobs are their key content and as with any content a poor “product” equals a poor consumer experience.

So why has this happened and where have those well crafted ads gone? Answer $$$$ – as job boards fought and fight for volume they have in the UK “commoditized” job postings for recruitment consultancies, $8 per post is not uncommon and with such a “low” price spending $10 on using professional copy writing skill does not seem to make sense, so cut and paste.

BUT just 10 years ago that same ad in a local paper costing $200 would be sent to an advertising agency a copy writer would read and amend/write, with a charge of $10/20. Result well crafted ad. BUT with an overall cost of $210/220 today same ad/post cost just $8 with no copy writing, a poor ad but still much less than in print. So why with such a saving on media costs have we deserted the advetising agency or professional copywriter even with a $20 fee for copywriting plus media it only costs $28 – answer greed – sorry but true.

So a lesson to all why with the media so much less do we save pennies to produce a poor product and end up harming our “brand/reputation”.

Alasdair Murray who is a professional copywriter and regular contributor to Jobsiteadvisor wrote an article on this topic ” A job desciption isn’t a sales tool"

Would love to hear views on this – am I being unfair?.

Keith