Now THIS is a hard sell!

Today I took a call from a very lovely Kiwi girl who has clearly moved to the big smoke (Sydney) and has taken this very exciting sales job…..selling advertising space in the career section of one of the major daily (print) newspapers.

That poor, poor woman. This would be like trying to sell gas heaters on a 44 C day. It wasn’t that she didn’t do her very best to convince me that I would get ‘better’ candidates advertising a PA/Office Administrator role in the print media, because she tried her darnedest. But there is no convincing me.

Despite her claim that 1.9million people read the print media on Saturday, I think more people read their news online. Certainly job seekers look for opportunities online. They look whilst they are on the train on the way home. They look during their lunch break.

They look after dinner when the kids are in bed and whilst the other half is laughing at My Kitchen Rules. They look online first thing in the morning before they start the drudgery of a new day.

They don’t wait for the job vacancy section of the Saturday morning newspaper. If they do buy some form of print media on the weekend, it’s my experience it’s for the magazine and the week’s news analysis. It’s for recreation, rather than for the immediacy of breaking news….and job ads. I think the last time I bought a newspaper was because I needed paper to light my log fire last winter. Job seekers are now well used at looking online at job sites like Seek, Indeed or Adzuna.

They are used to being ‘contacted’ through LinkedIn and being invited to apply for jobs. They are used to ‘alerts’ that email them when new jobs are advertised. They DON’T wait for the Saturday morning newspaper.

If YOU are waiting for the Saturday paper to find what jobs are available, you are in a world of pain. There may be a hundred jobs advertised in the paper but a thousand online. I should have asked this poor woman if she needed help finding another job because the only thing harder than selling advertising space for job vacancies would be getting the average householder to take a copy of the Watchtower* magazine…and by the way…they have an online version too!!

*The magazine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses