As we’re all going through plenty of turmoil at the moment I thought it would be a great idea to take a fresh look at the process of recruiting.  More specifically let’s look at job advertising:

Why do companies advertise jobs?

• To attract the best people?
• To facilitate revenue growth?
• To cope with peaks in their workload?
• To generate awareness of their company?
• To phish for people’s CVs?

Maybe I’m cynical about this but surely sticking a job post on a job board is not going to attract the best people.  What it will do in the main is attract people that are either out of work, or just about to be out of work.  It will however increase recruitment agencies’ list of names to search for next time a similar vacancy comes up!

For service industries where a high percentage of contractors are employed, advertising jobs to bring more bodies on-board is a good idea especially for the directors of the company involved.

Advertising jobs to bring in new people to help smooth out peaks in workload seems like a sound practice but this depends on how many and how quickly they are brought in.  Large scale recruitment like this can lead to the “Emperor’s new clothes” style of project where everyone is doing nothing but everything is fine (according to senior management).  Call this the consultancy approach if you will.

Advertising fictitious jobs is a cheap method (in more ways than one) of raising the awareness of your company’s brand.

A very common ruse used by recruitment agencies is to “phish” for peoples CVs by advertising non-existent jobs.  People by the very secrecy of the process don’t get to know the name of the company supposedly with a vacancy to fill.  It’s cheaper than paying job board rates for searching a CV database and a useful hook (no pun intended) to attempt to get leads from unsuspecting people.

In the words of my business partner, the whole recruitment process is “so bad it’s not even wrong!” 

Maybe, just maybe, this whole thing is the wrong way up.  To be continued…..