by Seth Godin
The classified section of the Sunday New York Times used to be more than twenty or thirty pages long. Now it’s down to one.
Part of this is due to the lack of new jobs in the post-industrial economy, but mostly it’s due to job listings moving online. I was fascinated to see some of the jobs in last week’s paper, and confess befuddlement at the thinking of those that ran them.
Here’s one, from Amazon, for a level II programmer in their New York office. Just a mailing address, no online method for contacting or applying. They’re using the newspaper to search for programmers unable to apply online, perhaps the best place to find this sort of programmer, but really, do they want them?
Or the ad from Paul, Weiss, a prestigious big law firm in New York. It’s the biggest ad on the page, and goes into a long, long list of requirements for the job–Magna Cum Laude from a famous law school, more than three years with one of their competitors, etc. Which high-powered New York lawyers are reading the last single page of newspaper classifieds?
And my favorite, an equally long ad for Deloitte that instructs the applicant to go to a website and enter a 15-digit code, including several “1”s, some “I”s and a bunch of letters and numbers. Almost unreadable in the paper, and hard to transcribe. More than a billion combinations… why not just enter NYT1124?
Lots of time and money being spent chasing the wrong people with the wrong ads.
My point, and I do have one, is that if your HR department is run by policies that were established a decade ago, worth a new look. And if you are serious, truly serious, that talent is your competitive advantage, please understand that the way you look for and sort that talent is the highest-leverage way you’ve got to increase what you end up with.