Even Santa Can’t Fix Recruitment Advertising

Two weeks ago, I posted a joke festive job advert. 

A confidential search for an Interim Chief Logistics Officer (Peak Trading Transformation), based in Northern Finland, offering ‘seasonal goodwill’ as part of the generous remuneration package.

It was deliberately tongue-in-cheek, and obviously so. A moment of festive frivolity. Subtlety wasn’t the point.

And yet within 24 hours I had more than twenty genuine applications.
Two weeks on, the number had more than doubled.

Even more remarkably, over half of the applicants told me they had read the advert “in detail” and “with interest”.

Which was slightly bizarre, because the role specification included such essential competencies as:

• Optimising chimney-access sequencing
• Proactive stabilisation of reindeer throughput
• Willingness to wear a pointy hat and lead from the front
• Proficiency in all known Christmas carols (harmonisation desirable)
• A culture underpinned by cheerfulness and the spontaneous singing of seasonal songs

One might reasonably assume that the requirement to manage animal-powered transport assets in sub-zero conditions would have raised a festive eyebrow or two. But no. People applied anyway. Over 40 now, some still coming in today well after the 12^th night.

Even better than that, when you applied, it automatically put the application email subject as ‘I Want To Be Santa’s Little Helper’

It highlighted, yet again, the growing problem with recruitment advertising: 

People don’t read job ads. They just apply.

Recruitment advertising has created a system where applying has become frictionless, one click, auto-filled CV, AI-assisted cover notes, done before the traditional job seeker had taken the lid of their fountain pen. The result is predictable: Volume without Value. Activity without intent. Noise without signal.

When I started in Executive Search, it was referred to as Search and Selection. We headhunted (search) and we advertised (selection). Even then, the former quietly outperformed the latter.

Advertising meant a quarter-page in the Sunday Times or the Financial Times. It was expensive, slow and mildly inconvenient, which turned out to be its greatest virtue and value. 

Candidates had to read properly, think properly, and respond properly. It filtered for seriousness before anyone ever spoke to anyone.

Now the opposite is true.

The easier it has become to apply, the less considered applications have become.

The festive advert made this painfully clear. In the first two hours it received more than 1,200 views. Within a week, over 18,000, all despite it only appearing on LinkedIN and via my Instagram stories (where you’ll find plenty of recruitment anecdotes).

Out of curiosity, I looked back at data from my last twenty completed senior searches.

On average, advertising generated 390 responses per role.
Search generated a longlist of 47.

From those, I met an average of 27 people per role from search, and just four from advertising.

Most telling of all:
Nineteen of the twenty roles were filled by searched candidates.
Only one came from advertising.

These were not junior appointments. Salaries ranged from £65,000 to £275,000. Critical leadership hires. The kind of roles where “good enough” is simply not good enough.

Advertising attracts the available. Search finds the exceptional.

Search/Headhunting targets the people who have no need to look for an alternative role. Those who are succeeding in their roles, respected and well-compensated. We have to find them, engage them, entice them. Not just settle for people blindly firing CVs into the void.

That is the difference.
And that is why search still works.

It cuts through the noise.
It replaces volume with value.

And crucially, it filters out those who don’t quite believe; in the role, in the opportunity, or sometimes in the existence of Santa.

Which is probably the real qualification I should have put in the advert.

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If you’d like to see the original festive advert, it’s still here in all its glory, still attracting applications:
garychaplin.com/opportunities/interim-chief-logistics-officer/

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