Year End Hiring
Business leaders are taking on the task of posting job ads due to recruitment challenges, but this approach often does not yield the desired candidates, highlighting the need to assess the effectiveness of online activities in relation to their goals.
A pattern showing up more and more often, particularly around busy hiring periods, is business leaders, sales directors and program managers personally advertising open roles within their own teams, rather than leaving that work entirely to internal recruitment as they might have in the past.
This trend looks like a symptom of internal recruitment teams asking business leaders to support candidate attraction efforts directly, often at a time when everyone across the organisation is being asked to do more with less. With reduced resources, tighter budgets and smaller recruitment teams, however well intentioned these individual efforts genuinely are, the overall feedback from leaders doing this is that it is not delivering the traction they hope for.
Either the online shares are not reaching enough of the right people to matter, or, just as often, they end up attracting candidates who are not actually suitable for the role in question, creating extra screening work rather than saving time.
If you are a business leader finding yourself in this position, do not feel guilty if your own posts are not generating the exposure or results you had expected going in. Recruitment and job platforms, by their nature, tend to favour whoever is paying for visibility and reach, which naturally limits how far an individual, unpaid share can realistically travel, regardless of how good the role or the message behind it actually is.
Two things are worth keeping firmly in mind if you find yourself taking on this kind of hiring support personally. First, keep a close eye on the actual return on investment from time spent posting and promoting roles yourself, rather than assuming effort automatically equals results.
Second, honestly evaluate the opportunity cost every time you spend hours on these activities, particularly when candidate attraction sits outside your core day to day role and responsibilities. That time often carries a higher value elsewhere in your actual job, and recognising that trade off clearly helps you decide when to lean on your recruitment team or an external partner instead of doing it all yourself.
