I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard the following objections:

• It’s not my job – why can’t the marketing department do it?

Well, who knows your client best? The consultant who has just returned from a client meeting or your marketing manager? By the time you have briefed the marketing manager, you could have the ad written! Your consultants are at the front line and are therefore the best people to ‘sell’ the job. And that also means making sure that consultants are not taking a job brief that isn’t going to produce decent candidates – after all you are consultants who know your markets so educate your clients!

• But I haven’t got time!

Ok – we all know that consultants don’t like being taken away from revenue earning activities but they need to see advertisements as just that- the potential to earn more revenue! The easiest way to make time is to ask your consultants to draft an advertisement at the point that the job brief is taken – in fact make it part of the job brief requirement. The vacancy will be fresh in the consultant’s mind and this way you will have a large bank of advertisements on file and ready to be used at any time.

• But we don’t know anything about SEO – isn’t that important?

Of course it is and if you do have a marketing department make sure that they are interacting with your job board and understanding the way to maximise advertisement positioning in search.

• The best candidates don’t apply for jobs on job boards anyway?

We think that’s a myth – but then we would day that wouldn’t we? However, to quote a consultant we were engaging with recently: “The reason why good candidates don’t respond to adverts is because they look like they’ve been written by dyslexic ten year old or because they are saying nothing different than the hundreds of other job ads out there.” Surely there’s an opportunity for differentiation here?

What do you think?