Part of making a job attractive is to market it well. But you can't market it if you don't respect it. So the first part in marketing is to come to terms with how you feel about the job.

Are you hiring someone to do something you consider "grunt" work? That's a hard job to respect. And, it tends to lead people to sheepwalking. If you're hiring someone to do grunt work, why? Sure, it's work that needs to be done, but if you think about it as grunt work, that's going to come across to your candidates.

Instead of considering the work "grunt" work, reconsider if you even need a person to do this work. Or, think of how you can explain how the work enhances the work of others in the organization. Here's an example of how two companies dealt with this with an HR administrator job. Company1 decided to buy one of those large systems that allow their employees to administer all their work. They hired someone who could teach the system, deal with the vendor and the IT staff. Of course, that person ended up having to help people enter their information, but that's a different problem :-(. Company2 hired an administrator, to free up the people who were supposed to do other work. This administrator could have felt like a servant, but they hired a delightful woman who took pride in saving the technical staff from the "chaff of their jobs--they got to work on the wheat." Company2's administrator dealt with the vendor, and made them make her job easier, so she could keep doing "chaff."

Two different approaches to the same job. Each approach allowed the administrator autonomy and a way to look at the strategic parts of the job. Not bad for an administrative position, right?

Once you configure the position so you can respect, it's a lot easier to market it. Sourcing (what recruiters do) is a form of marketing. There are a ton of marketing techniques, and I'll address that in the next post.

Labels: attractive job

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 11:38 AM | link |