Lying Through Your Job Posting

Technical Recruiter at Omniture; passionate about leveraging technology to improve people’s lives

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Lying Through Your Job Posting

By Robert Merrill ⋅ November 7, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Employers complain at-times that they "just can’t find the right people". They’ve posted job ads, emailed their network, schmoozed their employees for referrals and they keep ending up with the wrong candidates in the interviews.

Maybe the wrong people are showing up because you’re lying about what you really want.

Time and again, I find employers posting job descriptions online that, in reality, are completely different from what the company is actually hiring for. Don’t get me wrong, it may be unintentional (it usually is), but it’s still a lie if it’s untrue.

I think lying job descriptions are symptoms of a few things:

Unclear on job requirements.
If you don’t know the job, but you think you know… how are you going to help anybody else know? Get the person who is managing the team, or (if needed) DOING this job regularly to help you outline the requirements.

Let’s Get Lucky.
Putting your wishlist of a perfect employee into your job ad is not the way to attract qualified applicants. Advertize for exactly what you want, not pie-in-the-sky.
Many employers are only willing to pay a certain salary, but their job-description matches someone earning double or triple that amount. Everytime you put "self-starter" or "without supervision"-type words in your posting (see number five, below) you should raise your budget $10K/yr. for the position.

Outsourcing = Oops.
If an administrator or other individual not deeply connected with the job had more than 10% to do with the posting, that’s a problem.

Cut-and-Paste Craziness.
I can see the thought process now: "Gee, the job posting we put up last year for the team-lead worked great. Let’s just copy that for these team-member positions"

HR-Happy.
"This job posting doesn’t sound ‘legal’ enough. Slap some HR boilerplate yadda-yadda in there about ‘works well under pressure’ and ‘team player’ and ’self-starter’ and all that."

Too Busy.
Your mother would remind you that an ‘ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. But by letting something inaccurate get published out to the web, you’re paying for it now with a ton of unmatched resumes and unqualified or over-qualified candidates.
I know, I know… it’s hard to type all that HR jargon into your blackberry while changing lanes on your way to the client presentation. You might have to schedule some time for this one all by itself. It’s a new-fangled thing called "single-tasking" and it’s actually quite effective at getting one thing done well.