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Jobs are the source of income on
which the livelihoods of people
depend. Myriad issues related to jobs and careers are the bread
and butter of human resource professionals, as well as
the indicators of the financial health of a country, happiness and quality
of life of its citizens. The dictionary defines job as an economic role
for which a person is paid. Occupation is defined as an activity or task
with which one occupies oneself; usually specifically the productive
activity, service, trade, or craft for which one is regularly
paid,whereas career is defined by the Oxford
Dictionary as an individual's "course or progress through life (or a
distinct portion of life)." It is
usually considered to pertain to remunerative work. On the
other hand, advertising is a non-personal communication for
products, services, or ideas that is paid for by an identified sponsor for
the purpose of influencing an audience (Bergh and Katz, 1999).
According to wikipedia, recruitment advertising, also known
as recruitment communications, includes all communications
used by an organization to attract talent to work in it. A stagnant
economy usually produces less jobs and lean job supplements in
newspapers. Advertising has two main executive functions: one, economic and
two, social. It is often praised for the former and criticized for the
latter. Lee & Johnson (2007) have identified the following functions
of advertisements: Advertising performs an `inform' function:
it communicates information about a product, its features, and its
location of sale. Advertising performs a `persuasive' function: it tries
to persuade consumers to purchase specific brands or to change
their attitude towards a product or company. Advertising performs
a `reminder function': it constantly reminds consumers about a
product so that they will keep buying the advertised product, instead of
the competitor's brand.
Job ads act as launching pads for beginners and enable the
already serving executives to move up the career ladder. While it seems
that the function of the jobs ads is to just reveal information about the
job openings, skills required, salary, etc., a quick scan of job ads would
reveal remarkable visual creativity, interlaced by a `must attract'
factor for talented candidates. From the earlier existing `buyers
market' (company-centric), the focus has now shifted to the `sellers
market' (candidate-centric). |
