Employers: Job Descriptions are Marketing Documents

Today, a very reputable Fortune 500 company asked me to handle a search for them.  The job description they sent me was a scant 126 words and contained one misspelling, one sentence fragment, a run-on sentence, and a split infinitive.  You might remember the world's most famous split infinitive, which is Star Trek's opening line "To boldly go where no man has gone before ..."  For you baseball fans, it was like batting through the cycle of grammatical errors.

As the son of an English teacher, this kind of stuff makes me cringe.  And this job description was for a six-figure leadership position with P&L responsibility!  If I were an institutional investor, I'd short the stock right now.

If you are a corporate recruiter -- please know that every job description is essentially a marketing document.  You will never, ever be able to attract good people if don't produce well written job collateral.  Sure, you'll always be able to get butts in the seats, but you'll have a very tough time attracting talent.

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Comments

[Srikanth]

I am in to mapping targeted companies as required by my clients. Just to give the heads up of the clients i handle, Cisco, Mororola, Avaya, Pega....

[Bill]

Absolutely true, Harry. Nothing irks me more as an executive candidate than a poorly written, vague, or half-hearted job description. It shows a distinct lack of discipline and/or understanding of the role and its responsibilities. If you really want to hire the best and the brightest, put forth the kind of effort that says, "we want the very best".