A pet peeve has developed over the past couple of months, settling into life here in Austin and looking for a new job: employers who do not keep their job postings current.
After a few weeks of consistent, aggressive online job hunting, it is pretty easy to spot the new job postings versus the old ones. I can tell in less than 3 seconds if a job I am seeing on Dice is the same posting as one I saw yesterday on Monster. Even when the job has been re-worded or posted by someone else on a recruiting team, it’s still almost always easy to spot. And while I appreciate the fact that recruiters are looking high and low for good candidates and don’t want to miss any potential channels, frankly, as a job hunter, I find the re-posting habit to cause a number of downstream problems.
Inconsistent Emphasis
I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve seen postings for the same position, but the wording in the posts places emphasis on different areas. For example, one Project Manager position I read on Dice emphasized the importance of SQL and .NET experience, while the version posted on the company’s website emphasized the criticality of ecommerce and data warehousing experience. Aside from the confusion this causes for a job seeker, it also raises questions about the potential employer — not the least of which is, “Do they actually KNOW what they want?” That’s never a good message to send to potential employees.
Outdated Information
This one is fast becoming the biggest of my pet peeves: once a single job is posted and then re-posted (or caught in spiders) all over the web, while the position may be filled within a month, the postings linger for several more weeks. A position that I know is now filled is still posted on one of the job boards I most often frequent, and it raises the question of the reliability of the rest of the job information listed on that site. I realize that recruiters are busy, but didn’t their mother ever tell them that all good little girls and boys are required to clean up after themselves?
Politics between External vs. Internal Recruiters
Consider this very common scenario: An external recruiter posts a job to a job board, and then a candidate applies directly on the employers website, effectively cutting the recruiter out of the equation. Obviously this is why recruiters so often post jobs without the company name, but sometimes the company name is too big or valuable to leave out. So then what? I have actually LOST access to positions that were a good fit and in which I had a tremendous amount of interest because the HR Department and an external recruiting firm got into a dispute over “who found me.” In the end, I’m sure they filled the job (though maybe not as brilliantly 
), but I got screwed in the meantime.
As more and more experienced professionals start flooding the market, this is going to get to be a bigger and bigger issue. We’re all looking for short-cuts, sources or insights to gain access to “the hidden job market,” and most of us would be willing to pay for something that truly works. Assuming it does. But I just canceled my RiseSmart account because it did not turn up a single opportunity that I hadn’t already found on my own. And my Hound.com trial subscription is in danger of being canceled because, though the positions it is turning up are new to me, they are almost all outdated and technically closed, even though they are still online.
The downside, of course, is that as recruiters move into the cat bird’s seat after years of being the mouse, odds aren’t great that there is going to be a widespread improvement in discipline on this front. And that just makes an already aggravating job hunt positively exhausting.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.