It’s that time of the year again. The time when sunlight streams through open windows—and illuminates the dust bunnies that gathered over a long winter.
So in honor of Spring, check those job postings and see if any of them are covered with cobwebs.
If there are closed jobs still lingering on the corporate site or on job boards, it’s time to make a policy decision. Keep ‘em or toss ‘em?
That may seem like a surprising question. So nip over to Recruitment Directory and read Cut the Fat. Expired Job Ads Should Not Be Displayed. In this short post, author Thomas Shaw opens a conversation about the practice of leaving old ads up in order to improve SEO for the site. Worth noting: Even if a corporate site is kept scrupulously up to date . . . there may still be old jobs from the company posted elsewhere.
As Shaw points out, expired ads and ads for filled positions are an aggravation to job-seekers. They waste time, raise false expectations, and leave a poor impression of the company’s HR practices. But commenter Peter offers an alternative interpretation, pointing out that older ads can be used by job-seekers for research into the company’s rates of job growth and staff turnover, as well as to compare jobs among various employers.
The key is transparency. If older ads are plainly marked as filled or expired, and they can be easily eliminated by a search filter, then there may be some value to making them available. Or it might be interesting to create a research library for job seekers on the corporate website, showing past ads and position descriptions along with statistics on number of applications, number of interviews, time to hire, etc. I haven’t seen this anywhere, but that doesn’t mean no one is doing it—and it could be an attractive candidate service.
In the spirit of Spring cleaning here at my own desk, I’ve dived into the Inbox and come up with an interesting white paper on Onboarding from Aberdeen Research. In case you’ve been searching for a good definition of onboarding (also called “induction”) Aberdeen offers this one: “the strategic process designed to attract and engage new employees, reaffirm their employment decision, acclimate them into the organization’s culture, and prepare them to contribute to a desired level as quickly as possible.”
The report provides some useful insights on obtaining employee engagement–well worth a download. One highlight: “Companies with a formal onboarding process are 2.5 times more likely than those with an informal process or no process to experience employee performance improvements within three months.”
Here’s another great thing about having a defined onboarding process. If there is a process, it can be described on the Careers site. And that will be attractive to a lot of candidates.
(Thanks to entheta for the flashy “feather” duster!)
Cynthia Giles has followed a serpentine career path from academia to publishing to marketing and design to information technology and corporate communications. There’s plenty of detail about this journey at www.cynthiagiles.com, but briefly--the common theme has been ideas, and how to present them effectively. Along the way, she became an accidental expert on data warehousing and business intelligence, and for the past ten years she has combined corporate contracting with an independent consulting practice that focuses on marketing strategy for smaller businesses and non-profits.
Having spent quite a bit of time looking for work, and anywhere from two weeks to two years inside a wide variety of American companies—she has given much thought to what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to creating a great employment fit.