Boats left alone on choppy waters

I had brunch with an old work colleague last week, who's now a senior director at a well-known employment services firm. He was talking about a recurrent image that comes into his head whenever he sees the launch of a new recruitment web site.

In that image, the client and the project director are carrying the new web site, in the form of a toy sailing boat, carefully down to a pond in the park. They gently put the boat into the water and let it sail towards the centre of the pond, where it becomes just one amongst hundreds of similar boats, and then the client and the project director turn their backs and walk away.

This, let me explain for the hard of thinking, is about the fact that most recruitment sites, once launched, are simply not managed or updated. At all. (Well, maybe there's some 'Hot Jobs' button, but that's it.) This is particularly bizarro now - the economy is going to hell in a nuclear-powered handcart and no careers site appears to have noticed.

As I write Radio 5 live are reporting further closures at lumbering entz emporium Zavvi. Today's news will mean another 295 job losses. But what's this? The careers site is still wittering on about 'growth both in-store and online'. (Hmm - that'll teach 'em not to build job sites in Flash.)

A random sample of the week's other casualties show similar stories. Barratts the shoe store - actually in administration - is still blithering on about a 'fast growing multi site retailing channel'. (The absence of hyphens is their error, not mine.) Thames Water (300 job losses) and Corus (3,500) don't seem to have bothered to update their recruitment messaging either.

Ulster Bank tells us: 'Our ambition is to be the Number One banking group on the island of Ireland. We're not there yet but we're progressing fast along our journey.' It also stresses the organisation's believe in work-life balance: with around 750 of their jobs about to go, I'd suggest the balance is definitely tipping towards the life rather than the work side. (Funny picture on that site, too - perhaps the girl on the parapet is thinking of jumping.)

So, what can we learn from this? That web sites need editors and need to be updated. And if you carry on spouting rec ad platitudes in times of grief and pain, how can you expect candidates to take you seriously at, well, any time?

Are there any careers sites out there that have directly addressed recession, possibly by contextualising redundancies in their organisation or even by adding content about how they, and/or their industries, are particularly resistant to downturn?

Comments

[Alex Hens]

Fair observations excellently (as usual) made.

I think it's hard to point at those companies in administration as culprits though - because whether they had a website editor or not (and because they're HR projects that almost certainly got treated as you suggest in your "Boating lake" analogy and so won't have - in my experience), anyone who might have been responsible for doing the updates are currently out there desperately leafing through other websites to find a new job themselves.

What you almost certainly have in that case (and in at least one of the cases I know this to be so) is a stand alone career website residing on their Rec Ad Agencies server which will be taken it down only when they remember / do a spring clean of the server and realise it's still up.

But as for those organisations that are still operating and have ambitions and expectations to be recruiting again one day - then you're absolutely right. To devalue the employer banding messages with such pure neglect and laziness is a terrible crime.

Remember: An employer brand is for life - not just for website launch day!

[local_celebrity]

You can still apply for a job at Barratts seemingly. And the Woolies’ graduate scheme. Perhaps we should give both of them a go and use the experience as the starting point for a hilarious Danny Wallace style bestseller. It might be a tragic and futile exercise. But it’s probably no more tragic or futile than what I’m trying to do at the moment (get another job in rec ad.)

A fine post, though. And nice to see someone tackling the issue of recruitment advertising and the recession head on. To be fair, I don’t know how anyone could write a standard recruitment ad these days. Take the “growth”, “exciting”, and “opportunity” out and what’s left? An empty shell, that’s what. Recruitment advertising is, by its very nature, optimistic (offering us a better, brighter future). In order to write in this climate, you’d need to stick plugs in your ears and sing tra-la-la...