Location, location, location

Now this post will be a bit wordy. There's a teeny bit of geography, some talk about recruiters, an anecdote and a call to action. Nothing serious, hope it's worth five minutes of your time.

People have never been really creative when it comes to the naming schemes of their geographical surroundings. Most places are named in the local language after geographical features, names of important people or denote how they relate to another important place nearby.

This is hardly ever a problem, it doesn't matter if a place is called Petershire, Persby or Petterstad in the grand scheme of things. In fact you find similar - or even identical names all over the world.

If you are in the recruitment business, even in today's work-from-home scenario, you hire where your customers are. That means that a recruiter who operates in York, Great Britain, would not be looking for people to hire in York, Alabama.

From my experience, the ranking of how busy recruiters are seems to go from those who recruit for singular companies, to those who have an agency, to those who are working for a recruitment and staffing firm. Because the staffing firms focus on a relatively large throughput of people with commonly available skill, they are more likely to process a large number of daily job ads.

And the faster one works, the faster one is prone to make errors.

Now, there is a particular staffing agency who consistently will post jobs in the location "Ede, G?vleborg" in Sweden, rather than in "Ede, Gelderland" in the Netherlands. This seems like a quick hit on enter, allowing the autofill to complete the selection, or perhaps it was done wrong once and it stays on as the default location.

But it's not just one of their recruiters doing it, it's multiple people. Either they share an account, or each one of them makes the exact same mistake!

The price tag on a Linkedin job post is rather nebulous, as it's based on what budget you put down, and what the cost is per impression or click. But the example given sets a $300 price tag on a 30 day job ad, so let's assume that. Tons of job seekers will see it pass by, or even click on it, only to find out it's placed in the wrong country. All that money goes to waste with no return on investment.

Because it's a high throughput industry, this staffing agency has a dozen ads up at any time, each drawing attention from people that are unlikely to want or be able to apply to it. So we can assume this could cost as much as $3600 dollar per month. I am not sure on profit margins on high-volume staffing, but that sounds like a lot of money.

Now, Linkedin offers an option to correct this. You can select the three dots at the top-right of the ad, report that something is not right, and select that the location is incorrect. I have done this dozens of times, hoping it helps, but the reality seems different.

Then you could find the company page, and send them a message that their ads have wrong targeting, including some links, maybe the name of the recruiter involved to speed things to the right desk. However, there never was a reply, and the postings continued.

Finally, hit them up on social media - twitter and facebook, for example - and hope that you get more than the usual "thank you for bringing this to our attention, we will forward this to the relevant teams", only for the dance to continue.

You might ask why I bother with this?

Because there are people out there that need those jobs, and they don't actually get to see them! Because that money being spent could've gotten some people jobs, and it didn't. And it doesn't matter if it's Ede or York - right now there's a lot of us that just need a chance.

So if you are a recruiter, please take that minute extra to check that your ad is correct, especially the location, save some bucks. And if you're a jobseeker and see an ad being targeted at the wrong place, please report it so that it can be changed.

You would want someone else to do it for you.