There are a lot of extremely talented people looking for work right now. In fact, there are a lot of talented, once-enthusiastic career seekers who have given up looking. While the job market is not as dismal in terms of available positions as it was a few years ago, turmoil continues as the company stability, resizing and relocation have contributed to a rapidly shifting landscape. Add to that the de-personalized, electronic nature of the process and you have what for many is an alien and difficult environment. For more job seekers than you might expect, the decision to apply for a listed position may turn on the degree of intimidation involved in the process.

• “No attachments accepted.”
• “Attachments only; emailed resumes will be discarded.”
• “Paste your qualifications into this box.”
• “On this line, explain any gaps in employment history.”
• “Why did you leave your last job?”
• “Include salary requirements.”

Employers who feel that they are competing for talent in the current job market may wish to give some thought to the accessibility of their personnel search process. Even for large firms that must have a structured, formalized HR process there are ways that the application process can be humanized. We at Sassy Slogans believe that the appearance of a job solicitation is an important door-opener and that a well done solicitation will lead to a quantifiable increase in quality applicants.

Consider this: how many of the resumes that come through your company actually get read? Perhaps the volume is overwhelming and a quick initial vetting process is necessary. But even if that is the case, there are ways to encourage qualified people who have no regard for HR departments that may respond to a resume with a postcard or an auto-email, but will never return a phone call. What sort of response do you think an ad along this line would get you?

• If you haven’t applied for a job in three months, we’d like to hear from you.
• We believe the way to a talented work force is to treat people who want to be with us as if we might think that’s a good idea too.
• Send us your pertinent details and if you might be a fit for us, we’ll sit down and talk with you.
• If we don’t feel you’re a fit, we’ll explain why.
• Either way, you’ll find that our recruiting office has real-time, real talk voices attached to real HR professionals. We’re building our company with more than just an email address.

It would probably result in a blizzard of responses, and your HR staff would be overloaded with responses. But an initial email would probably cut the phone traffic to the negative responses by half or more. A polite, two minute discourse would complete the process with ninety percent of the rest.

And in the stack of resumes that get an initial interview, you’re going to find people that haven’t responded to job solicitations for a long time, either because they were worn down by the process or because they didn’t have to. You will have a talent pool that your competitors haven’t seen because they’d rather automate than communicate. And you’ll hear from currently employed professionals as well, because you’ll have an ad that resembles no other.

At Sassy Slogans, our job is to put words together that get attention and provoke a response. Give us a chance, and we’ll provoke some new talent for your business.