I’m reading posts in recruiter message boards that are discussing low salesperson response rates to employment ads placed on monster, local newspapers and publications. From the amount of responses to this subject, it appears many other recruiters are having similar difficulties.
I then read the opening paragraph from this article that states:
Seventy-six percent of employees are looking for new employment opportunities, according to the 2005 U.S. Job Recovery and Retention Survey released today by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and CareerJournal.com. Sixty-five percent of HR professionals indicated they were concerned about the voluntary resignations at their organizations. To prevent a mass exodus, almost half of the organizations surveyed are implementing special retention processes to keep their employees.
76% are looking for new employment opportunities yet these recruiters are not getting a good response to their sales ads placed in multiple media. Something is amiss. We covered this topic yesterday in some detail and I want to hit upon it one more time.
The advice this recruiter received (from other recruiters) was to advertise in more media locations for longer periods of time. Great advice if you are selling advertising. Bad advice if you are hiring salespeople.
I took the time to hunt down the ad. The position seems to have a decent pay and a doable commission structure (from what I could infer). Yet, the recruiter could run that ad for 3 years and not get a good response. The ad is written in the first person, speaks about degrees and typing speed and is too long.
As Mark Twain once quipped, “I’d write you a shorter letter, but I haven’t the time.” Think of that quote when authoring employment ads.