Traditional Job Postings Are Dead

[00:00:00] All right. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick, joined by Jeff Smith, and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where you break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space. Maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in all of our content can be found at Talentinsights@hirewell.com.
Jeff, are you ready for this week’s topic, episode 115? I am. And side note, if anybody is interested in blowing off a little steam and your local to Chicago, the greatest band in the world is playing this weekend. Oh, Jesus. No. Oh God. We were just talking about creativity. The height of creativity is this band.
Go see them. Oh my God. Can’t believe you just plugged that. Anyways, we’re talking about
traditional job postings are dead. That is the topic for this week. And I guess we’re gonna have to qualify what we mean by traditional job postings. So first off. A little business news if you haven’t been paying attention, because this is interesting. [00:01:00] Indeed and Glassdoor, both owned by the same company nowadays.
That’s kinda the first thing. Consolidation. They laid off 1300 in July from their technology group. Glassdoor’s, CEO is bouncing by October 1st, and they in 2023 and 2024, they laid off twenty-two hundred and one thousand people respectively. So these companies are shrinking. They mostly do job ads. On top of that Career builder and Monster now merged,
by the way, another consolidation filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy a year after the merger. Does anyone even remember CareerBuilder Monster at this point? Yeah, I know. Those might be relics from our day. Yeah. So Jeff, what the hell is going on with job boards Post says it all. Title says it. All right.
I already ruined it. Ruined it with the title. Yeah. Job postings are dead and, you know, maybe they weren’t alive to begin with. You look back even 20 years ago, and we were all kind of saying, what is the utility [00:02:00] of these things? We’ll kind of go through a few different points of everything, but the overarching, you know, theme here is
job descriptions were never meant or designed to attract people. There’s a big difference between advertising and describing, right? Yeah. The main focus of a description is to cover HRs ass essentially Yeah. The shout out to, I don’t even want to take this point on, ’cause Mitch Sullivan, He has said if you’re not following him on LinkedIn, you should.
He’s, when people always ask me, like, when I say him, the number three ranked sarcastic commenter on LinkedIn, who’s number one and two. One of them’s Mitch Sullivan. Yeah. And he has the edge just ’cause he is, he’s a Brit. Yeah. Job descriptions are not job ads. It’s right in his tagline. And, I mean, what are job descriptions?
That’s legal disclaimers. They got bloated jargon. It’s unrealistic wishlist, it’s just copy and pasted from other ones, like it’s compliance driven copy. Period. That was the purpose of a job ad like brain dump of everything you want this person to do, make sure you cover all the bases. [00:03:00] It was never intended to be the same thing as a job ad.
It’s not effective marketing, somehow it’s still common. Mitch explains this better than I do. Nothing I’m saying so far is net new, but we want to kind of lay the groundwork that this is always kind of inherently a flawed concept. Yep. The second piece to this posting mythology is most top talent isn’t looking.
They’re listening. Yeah. They’re taking advantage capitalists as it were. I don’t wanna start a flame throwing, you know, war over who or what qualifies as top talent, that’s not what we’re, that’s not the objective of this. I think we can all agree that people scrolling job boards or the candidates that are in interested in looking at job boards are either a, not working.
A totally viable use case or really, really, really dislike their job. Anyone who is [00:04:00] engaged at work is spoiler, working. Working, yeah. Or doing their work day to day. So there are great people who are unemployed, you know, or hate their boss and, might take a look every now and again, but they are a very, very small slice of this talent pool.
And the point is, as a marketing tool, as something that’s going to attract top talent to your job. Job ads only pop up to a sliver of the employee population, and it’s because they’re not actively seeking those things out. And further there’s this bullshit stigma of inbound applicants being worse than anyways, so it further dilutes the value of that actual ad.
Okay. I wanna get to the third point here, ’cause this is where I think, this is the thing I think in this whole discussion that is a little bit net new in the age of AI. AI has inverted the candidate pipeline. So 1000%. We’ve talked in the past, I know I’ve talked about [00:05:00] it, and people are probably well aware.
AI lets job seekers apply to a hundred different jobs in one click. So completely broke the inbound funnel. Job seekers, some of them at first, like that’s great, I can apply. And now it’s, but the problem is you’re now, instead of competing against a hundred other people, you’re competing against a thousand others.
So it’s not good for job seekers because now it’s unmanageable, but it’s also not good for companies either because they post something, it’s just completely flooded. It’s that much more to go through. Or worse, they use AI to try to figure out. Then you got AI bots talking to AI bots doing the vetting.
Okay. Even still, here’s the point. That is net new. Sending a job ad or sending your resume, applying to a job ad is not the end of the research process for job seekers anymore. It’s the beginning now. Let me kind of say this again. Every recruiter out there at some point in time has talked to somebody who, you know, applied to a job and then they spot it like that person didn’t remember applying.
This is not completely new. The problem is that is the most common thing [00:06:00] right now. That used to be an every once in a blue moon kind of thing where you talk to somebody who didn’t remember applying to your company. Now, that’s most candidates. So instead of people who, like, there are still a lot of people out there who they don’t apply till they do the research.
They check everything out. They make sure, yes, I’m actually qualified for this job. They click send those kind of candidates, when they get a response back, they’re on it, they’re excited or whatever. Those are few and far between compared to the amount of volume you’re gonna get with your thing now.
So, and think about this, think about this like it to further solidify the point, recruiters are now walking into those conversations thinking, oh, we’ve got an inbound applicant. Again, just clarifying what you’re saying, they have to be interested. All of what you just said completely negates that. Yeah, most applicants have no idea who you are, nor do they really care, which is absolutely wild. Now,
ultimately the meaning of this, and really the takeaway kind of from this part is talent acquisition teams have to sell to inbound candidates. They have to get them excited, [00:07:00] they have to be able to convey the value, they have to explain why they enjoy it there. They have to explain where the company’s going.
They didn’t always, just to get the first real interview set up, they didn’t always need to do this. And this is something that is vastly different now and we’ve actually. Signed clients recently specifically to have us manage their inbound for them because they recognize this is a problem. And if you would’ve told me in 2025 we’d be getting RPO projects, managing inbound because they need more skilled people to do it, I would’ve never thought that’s something we’d ever see.
But it’s happening. Yeah. It doubled down. The big differentiator of an internal recruiter versus an external agency side recruiter has always been the latter is a sales person first. Yeah. And the former isn’t, and the former better get used to selling is based, is the main takeaway for internal recruiters.
The job has become much more of a convince the candidate to, to kind of go through this process. Yeah. All of this stuff pops up in [00:08:00] two very distinct ways. The first being. Content is content, specifically this stuff.
It’s not only the top of the funnel. It sells through the funnel. So a few points here.
You know, I know everybody’s saying, guys, we’re the guy’s doing video right now on LinkedIn. Turn up video on LinkedIn. We’re gonna, we’re gonna plug content. Okay? But here some stats. Since 2021, 50% of Hirewell’s, new hires first heard about us through content, not a job posting. Fact, and all of those people that were onboarded never even applied to a job posting for us.
Video job briefs, personalized voiced direct messaging, thought leadership, pieces by our executives, us, you know, hiring managers, and your personal favorite. I love it. The FAQ. It’s so easy and so brilliant. I still have people talk to me about this. I had someone [00:09:00] mention this to me the other day.
They love how we did it. So long story short, well, a side note here. Yeah. Quick tip. Every time you talk to someone who applies to you and asks you a question, if you’re an internal recruiter, write down what their questions were. Put all those together, answer each individual, one post on your webpage. All candidates wanna know is like the details, like you’re answering the exact same questions
you’re gonna get down the process later in the time anyway. It’s right there for everyone to see you on your careers page. Makes your life a lot easier. Sorry. Continue and make that, make the landing page fun. Yeah. Throw a few videos in there. They go to the FAQ and they see the excitement around actual team members who work at the company right now.
So, so easy. Yeah. The point attracting talent has to occur where they hang out. Full stop. Yeah. In this case, mostly LinkedIn, right? For us office dorks, not where AI is spamming all of these resumes, IE job boards. Next point. We’ve already kind of mentioned this one, but recruiters have to actually recruit inbound candidates.
I, no offense to newbies, [00:10:00] no offense people just kind of starting their career. A lot of time, that’s where they get their start, is managing kind of the inbound funnel, doing the quote unquote easy stuff. The problem is like the days of just passively scheduling inbound people are over. You have to headhunt them.
You have to headhunt them the same way you would proactively going after outbound candidates. It’s a wild time, but you have to be, from start to finish, every touch point you have to be excited. You have to find a reason to get them excited. It’s not just grinding through administrative type job anymore.
And that’s just the reality of kind of what AI’s done to it. So, I mean, perhaps it’s a good end result, like at the end of the day, like, yeah, you know, maybe the end of all this is a better candidate experience and skeptical. But anyways, all right, let’s rip through some things. What modern recruiting looks like?
Our takeaways. I know you got a few. I got a few. Go for it. Yeah. Smart companies are doing, you know, these things, to attract candidates. I can’t emphasize it enough. We’ve done, I think, a whole piece on it a while back. Job [00:11:00] descriptions are used for internal alignment. Do not put a stale list of knowledge, skills, and abilities out on the internet for people to apply to.
It is not public marketing. It will not work. Don’t do it. Write something snazzy. Put some content into it. Embed some video. Make it fun. Two, candidates apply first, then consume content to decide if you’re legit. So think about this for a second. They apply, the recruiter gets back to them. The next thing an applicant does is go to the site to find what the FAQ, like the reviews, all of that stuff.
If it’s not tight, they’ll go to a place that does have it tight. Yeah. Number three, your direct messages are stronger than your job ads. Personalize them, story tell, be human. Talk about yourself. Simple stuff, but it matters. [00:12:00] Yeah. And don’t do any deep fake personalization anyways. You talk about content employer, so employer brand, perhaps making a comeback.
I’ll just, it exists everywhere. I’ll just say this, those of you who’ve been longtime followers, I used to do a show called The Employer Content Show with my buddy Nate Guggia, 27 episodes on employer content. What actually works, we actually stopped because we’re like, we nailed it and I don’t actually believe anything’s really changed since we finished that show up.
It’s still out there on talentinsights.hirewell.com You can find it. And lastly, I can’t emphasize this enough. You need skilled recruiters managing your inbound.I should have said this earlier. It’s the same realization that SaaS companies came to a few years ago, like it used to be,
they used to have, no offense again to like SDRs and BDRs. They used to have their most low level salespeople manage their inbound. Then they realize, wait, these are potentially the warm leads that should be a bigger lay up. We need to have our skilled sellers actually selling to them. And that’s what you need when you’re talking to inbound candidates for potentially hiring.
You need skilled sellers. You need recruiters who can actually get people excited about the role because they aren’t [00:13:00] just by the nature of having them applied. Anyways, we are short on clock. Anything else, Jeff? Nailed it. All right. Thanks again for tuning in 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insight series, which is always available free play on talentinsights.hirewell.com, as well as YouTube, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always, everyone out there. We will see you soon.