Selling your jobs to candidates

Another good one from Seth Godin today. Regarding the increasing use of online videos by marketing firms (and in my experience graduate recruiters now) to be 'different' in their approach to finding the best people to recruit, often by being more viral or more funny than the next company, Seth posits the following:

Just as a great product becomes remarkable--not because of the marketing claims, but because it really is worth talking about--a great job can be the same sort of thing. I'd use the video in a different way. Instead of trying to be funny viral, I'd try to be honest viral. Let me really understand who the boss is going to be, what the office is like, what the work is like. Sell the job, not the job opening.

I always like it when I hear someone outside of the 'recruitment market' who just 'gets it'. If your job is worth doing then sell it properly to people. Increasingly we are operating in a candidate-centric market with a huge number of companies fighting over the same small pool of exceptional candidates. Don't want to be left with the dregs? Make sure you have a good spec, a clear idea of who you want, a good proposition in terms of career development, a great office, a strong team, phenomenal managers and all the rest too. If you're remarkable, people will remark upon it.