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Last month we introduced a new type of travel certificate. While the industry has increasingly asked for lower priced products that offer very little benefit to the recipient, I thought I would go the other way and merge a few popular products together to offer a better value. This product has been tremendously successful and that means my staff is now swamped with travel requests. I need to hire some people but it turns out that’s not as easy as you would think.
With all the news about unemployment being high you would think that a small ad in the newspaper or on an online job posting would bring a deluge of qualified applicants. I figured I would list the positions I had open on Craig’s List since it is a popular place to look for a job in our area. Can you believe that I didn’t have one response? Not one!
Now, I’m not paying a 6 figure salary but I’m also not looking for a lot of experience either. I pretty much train my people from the ground up, entry level as they say, and I pay an average starting wage for this part of the country plus an incentive bonus based on how well we are doing. Many people have done quite well here especially when we come out with products that are as successful as our most recent offerings.
I thought that maybe I posted it to late in the day and by the time the job hunters got started the next day my ad had moved down several pages or something. So, I posted it again first thing the next morning and still no response except from a marketing company in New York that wanted me to hire their phone room.
Dismayed, I then decided to list the ad on a job site here in Florida. It’s a place where people can post their resumes and companies can post jobs. I guess the theory is that I could search the resumes for qualified applicants and applicants can search the job bank for jobs they would like. If either finds a match they can contact the other. Sounds pretty simple but that’s not how it really works.
I found a couple candidates in the resume search but they had already found jobs. It probably would have helpful if they had removed their resume. I’d start to tell them about the position and they would act real interested. When we got to a point where they decided that they didn’t want the job, THEN they would tell me there were already employed! This turned out to be a total waste of time.
Meanwhile, my inbox was filling up with resumes faster than I could read them. Unfortunately, none of them even came close to what I was looking for. It seems these job boards have an automatic resume response feature where lazy applicants can send a resume to every job posting hoping to get an offer. When you call them, they have no idea what you are calling about. It’s ridiculous!
I finally turned off the automation and just went back to the old fashioned way. I instructed the applicants to drop by and fill out an application. Believe it or not, less than an hour later the perfect applicant came through the door and I hired her on the spot.
Technology is great when we develop something that will do what couldn’t be done before, but to do something simple that we’ve been doing successfully for years, it’s totally useless.
Tags: economy, employment, lay offs, sales incentives, travel certificates
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