An Open Letter to Recruitment Consultants

Dear Recruitment Consultants of the World,

I know you have to work hard in order to make your job adverts stand out from the crowd, and sometimes a quirky title can help to achieve that. But, as a professionally qualified candidate, I do feel I should warn you that, more often than not, a quirky advert title makes you stand out for all the wrong reasons.

For example, IMMEDIATE START!!! is useless, because it tells me nothing about the job, other than it starts immediately. Of course, it could be the perfect job for me, or it could be flipping burgers in a fast-food restaurant. The point is I don’t know, and when other recruiters actually take the time to tell me what they are advertising, the chances are I am going to click on their adverts rather than your one. The same goes for DO YOU HATE YOUR CURRENT JOB!?! Well, yes, thanks for asking; but there’s nothing in your advert title to make me think that I might like the job you’ve got on any more than my current one. Likewise, DO YOU WANT TO HAVE FUN AT WORK AGAIN? as a title will get the answer “yes”, but still tells me precisely nothing about what the job is. My idea of fun may be very different from your idea of fun, and I’m reluctant to waste valuable seconds of my life clicking on your job advert to compare our differing conceptions of having a good time at work.

My point is this; if you want to someone like me to click on one of your adverts, then I need to see what the job title is. If there is no indication of what the job is, then I’m going to wonder why. And I’m going to wonder what is so bad about the role you’re recruiting for that you have to hide it behind a banal, sorry quirky, ad title. Put simply, these sort of shit titles might work well if you’re looking for slack-jawed chuggers to financially molest people on the streets of Britain, but for any job with just a little bit more professionalism and to attract candidates who conduct themselves with just a little bit more dignity than the chugging scum, you need to come up with an ad title that is more professional and more informative.

Best,
The Nameless Libertarian.