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Are Recruiters Like Used Car Sales People?

By Kathy Barton, September 10, 2008

Okay, be honest.  Did you cringe when you read the title?  Do you hate to think about being compared to a used car sales person?  After all, used car sales people used to stand for everything that's shady, shabby, and shifty about sales.  However, just like recruiting, a lot has changed in the used car profession.  Ever heard of Carmax?  Talk about a company that has transformed an industry!  And just like recruiting, used car sales also has been transformed by the Internet.  While people still put car ads in newspapers, most now go to Craigslist, autotrader.com, usedcars.com or carsforsale.com. If you are selling a car, you place an ad on-line just like you used to in the newspaper.  And guess what?  Just like in recruiting, most ads are boring, full of acronyms and abbreviations, and they all look the same.  And just like in recruiting, the person who writes a creative or compelling ad has a competitive advantage.

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What got me thinking about this was talking to Steve Broberg, our Operations Manager.  Steve has an interesting hobby:  buying and selling used cars on Craigslist. He finds a great deal on a fun car, tinkers with it a bit, and then sells it at a profit.  Most car ads on Craigslist simply list the attributes of the car, and thus they all look the same.  Steve told me that he gets a competitive advantage by using The Adler Group's Performance-based Hiring techniques for writing creative ads.  I asked for an example, and here's what he said:

I purchased a very nice 1989 Lincoln Town Car after it sat on Craigslist for 8 months (with a very boring ad).  I bought it and reposted it, selling it at a 60% profit after just a couple of weeks.  It's not that the previous seller was trying to sell a bad vehicle – it really was a spectacular car, just impractical – he simply wasn't marketing it correctly.  Coloradans are all about "going green," so my ad needed to be the complete opposite in order to attract the right attention to sell a not-so-green car.  I knew that the only type of person who would buy this car would be one who saw its apparent faults as assets, so I marketed it as such – the buyer turned out to be a 17-year-old male who absolutely loved huge cars.   Sure, I had to include the pertinent information about the car (same as with an ad for a job you're trying to fill), but what I stressed was the car's image and the opportunities it provided the driver.  Here's the ad, starting with its somewhat politically-incorrect title (notice that the title doesn't even say what type of car it is!):

Al Gore Hates My Car!

This car is big, long, and heavy. It has a huge V8 engine, rear-wheel drive, and gets mediocre gas mileage at best. What a totally impractical car to have in Colorado! Which is the perfect reason to buy it, of course! Who else but you would drive something so outlandishly impractical that thumbs its proverbial nose at those tree-huggers in Boulder?! It even has a couple of NRA stickers in the windows for good measure. Did I mention you could almost park a Subaru on the hood and fit a Toyota Prius in the trunk?! 

Here are the stats on this 1989 Lincoln Town Car (as if they even matter after such a compelling sales pitch as the one you just read):

The Good: Runs great, 5.0 liter V8, seats 6 (great for all your friends on prom night), Automatic transmission, AC and heat work, power everything, cruise control, leather seats, good dash, carpet and headliner, the vinyl top is in amazing condition, other than normal dings and scratches the paint is in great shape, no rust at all. There's a lighted analog thermometer on the driver's side mirror – how cool is that?!

The Bad: The stereo pretty much stinks, so you'll want to replace it.

The Ugly: All the other lame cars people are selling for the same price as this beautiful specimen of American steel! 

There are some great lessons here for writing creative, compelling job ads.  First, there is someone out there for whom your job is a great job.  Even if, like Steve's Lincoln Town Car, your job isn't the coolest job out there, or doesn't command a great salary or terrific perks, there is someone who will think that your job is a great deal. See if there's a way that you can turn your job's apparent flaws into assets.  Lots of travel?  See the world!  Entry-level?  Great opportunity for promotion! 

Second, use humor.  Humor is one of the most effective ways to catch people's attention, to differentiate your job from the millions of other jobs that are posted every month, and to give people the sense that your company would be a fun place to work.  During our training classes, we have a competition based on writing the most creative or compelling ad.  We are always amazed by what people come up with in 15 minutes or less.  Once our winners wrote an ad that was so good I was almost tempted to apply for the accounting job they were advertizing!  Just that little problem about qualifications . . .

Third, play off of something in the popular culture.  It's great if it's current, but it doesn't have to be (such as Steve's current reference to Al Gore and the environment, and to the older film, The Good, the bad, and the Ugly).  We've had banks fill daytime shifts with ad titles such as "Attention, Desperate Housewives!"  Or entry-level sales with "This sales job is shagadelic!" after the opening of the latest Austin Powers movie.  Anything that gives you a hook to grab someone's attention and make your job stand out from the rest of the pack.

So, are recruiters like used car sales people?  Well, if you start writing creative, compelling ads, you might get the same level of success at recruiting as Steve gets at selling used cars!