Help Wanted Help

A common piece of advice to job seekers is: Don’t focus your resume and cover letter on what you want; focus on how you offer what the hiring company wants. This advice also applies in reverse to a hiring company writing a job ad, but in practice, it’s almost never followed, which is why this ad for a position at the Irvine Public Schools Foundation (IPSF) jumped out at me:

(Read the rest of the article here: http://eppsnet.com/2006/05/antipattern-bore-people-to-death-with-your-job-ads)

You have to give it to Mark Cuban.  He is awfully smart and has the money, too. 

He has a very popular blog—and basically allows the world inside his head.  It alone is an entertaining read.

So…he wants to find a new player for his team…not his Mavericks team, the other, a business one.  Does he take out an ad on Monster?  No….he challenges job seekers to apply by giving him an idea he needs and hasn’t heard yet.  This sounds a bit like Nick Corcodilos’s advice to jobseekers: Be sure you tell your prospective employer exactly what you can do for him.

So, the Mark Cuban Challenge is up now, and only about 1,000 people have responded—scroll through their responses.

The point is, is your help wanted advertising getting this kind of response.  You might not have this type of platform, but you can get the word out by being creative.

Increasingly, employers are being watched for any potential discrimination claims.  Some attorneys carefully sift through internet and newspaper ads, looking for help wanted ads that make specific, but discriminatory requests.  Then, they threaten the employer with a suit; most employers hate the resulting publicity and settle the suit to make the ‘problem’ go away.

Even simple ads or phrases that ask for ‘Recent College Graduates” typically are found  to violate discrimination laws.  THe employer may never have an issue with the ads.  But why risk it?  Keep a copy of all help wanted ads on file for at least one year to prove your point and your commitment to non-discriminatory hiring practices.

Some help wanted vendors keep copies of all your ads in their archiving system.  Be sure they do, or you need to do the same.

Someone told me once that you should write for the one single reader. Make it understandable, clear, direct and to the point for only one person. If that person can read it, then others can too.

Blogging is a new thing, almost a new science. Here is what I am thinking of doing with this new blog—HELPWANTEDHELP: It seems to me that few of us know how to create a job ad that really communicates to the jobseeker today. It seems so easy that we all should know exactly how to make one.

If this is true, then why do most help wanted ads sound more like job descriptions than interest generating advertisements for your company. Most are bad, boring…and at worse, truly uninformative and not very helpful for the potential candidate.

My intention is to shed some light on this topic. And, I hope that at least one reader (!!!) from time to time will add to the discussion and information exchange.

We will have lots of actual ads as examples, some bad some good some great.

I am planning on having some fun with this…and I hope you do as well.