A Creative Way to Reach Out to Talent or Market Yourself

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

When I began my career in recruiting IT professionals in 1972, COBOL and Autocoder (don’t ask) were the main technologies. I found jobs for people in New York City and that meant I advertised in the Sunday New York Times. If a ran an ad in the classified section, each ad had to be a minimum of 3 lines. It would be on the bottom of the page where no one saw it and cost more than $12. In today’s dollars, that is $68.51 in 2015 dollars for an ad no one would see and you could do nothing to describe the position.

Today, no one would respond to an ad like that. People rightly want more than 5 words of job description and a place to send their resume to. Today, people want to know about the job and its requirements, as well as the responsibilities they will have if hired.

But firms make the mistake of writing these bureaucratic ads with lists of requirements and responsibilities with bullet points next to each or they try the “forced hip” approach to advertising (“If you’re the best person in Silicon Valley and want to change the world by helping to develop something that will revolutionize . . . ).

The way companies reach out to talent has been limited for a long time. Today, the model involves advertising the job on the corporate website or…