We’ve had a very busy Q1 which has led to many sales positions for which we are actively sourcing right now. Hence, sourcing is foremost on our minds. We are not part of the “anti-online job boards” crowd. We actually find the boards to be quite efficient and effective for finding strong sales candidates. Our approach incorporates other channels simultaneously to broaden our candidate pool, but the boards should not be ignored.
That being said, there is a critical piece of information to placing ads that should be maintained. Titles equal opens, plain and simple. I know this fact isn’t a revelation, but many companies still ignore it. We have tweaked similar ads to observe open rates and responses. Titles are important on job boards since that is probably all the candidates will see. None of the major boards preview the ad in their job search agents (I subscribe to all of them).
We have one customer who provided a simplistic title of Product Specialist which wasn’t going to cut it. This position was to sell into specific niche markets, in a geographic territory with marketing control to expand their market share. Product Specialist did not draw the right candidates. A quick change to a more apt title – Regional Sales Manager – led to a far better response rate and clearly stronger candidates.
Titles are cheap. Poorly-written ads are expensive.