INSIDE THE 
NEWS + ADVICE
Are Job Postings Dead
The big news of late is that Zappos got rid of its job postings. Yep, to get a job at Zappos you now have to be part of “their” community, become an Insider. This shift in recruiting is about building relationships with a talent pool that will do best within the Zappos’ environment. Last year, Zappos reviewed 31,000 applicants and only hired 1.5% of them.
The recruiting community has gone wild with posts for and against this new thinking. It has long been stated that job postings are poorly written, ineffective and do not meet the needs of both parties – recruiter and job seeker. In the last 15 years several new recruiting technologies have been launched with the intent of improving the hiring process and making it easier to recruit talented professionals.
The challenge with this is that when recruiting technology changes, the job seeker doesn’t necessarily know about it. Job seekers don’t understand OFCCP, ATS or any of the top recommended innovative ways recruiters have been or are currently being told to recruit. You tell an applicant – specifically a cleared candidate – how you sourced them and they will more than likely freak out.
Building relationships with your talent pool is essential. Especially in a niche community. Being transparent with them as to how you found them, what the hiring process is about and what is the best way to move forward will do wonders for your hiring ratios.
Back to job postings, yes these are the bane of everyone and they do need to improve. Throwing them out completely is not the answer. Significantly improving them is. How?
1. Read your own job posting. Would you want to apply?
2. Translate for your reader. Too many job postings in the cleared community are just copied and pasted from the government contract.
3. Speak to the veteran. Your best candidate might be a veteran, but you need to meet them half way by translating your job requirements to match military occupational specialties (MOS).
Sorry to tell the recruiting innovators, but some of the folks you are trying to reach still have dial-up.
I think Zappos will be Zapped by this process–unless they’re only seeking applicants who aren’t currently employed. Who has time to join yet another networking community? if they only hired 1.5% of the reviewed applicants, they have a broken process internally and are either posting descriptions that don’t fit the job, aren’t targetting their postings to the right audience or don’t have good screening processes. Be interesting to see how it works out.