Welcome to the second installment of the Direct Funding Recruitment Survival Guide!  Using the tips from the first installment, Crafting your Job Ad, you now have compelling job ads, but where do you advertise them and how do you do it effectively?  As a self-manager, CILT or your local ILC has likely pointed you to their “Finding Staff” and “Tips for Advertising” pages and left you with their rudimentary “Advertising Package 2015” document listing a handful of potential places to advertise.  This material is dated and leaves a lot to be desired, so I was pleased to hear that toward the end of 2021, CILT organized Zoom meetings with self-managers to share practical and timely recruitment ideas (sadly, I didn’t receive the memo to participate!).  By organizing these meetings, CILT was finally acknowledging the hiring crisis facing self-managers, but despite whatever good intentions there might have been, the initiative ultimately ended up as a squandered opportunity.  Why?  The only tangible result from these sessions was another document, “Hiring Resources”, listing a few potentially-relevant places to advertise and a much larger list of not-applicable places.  As far as I can tell, this information hasn’t even been integrated into the Direct Funding website and only exists as a footnote link in the news/memo section, where it is unlikely to be seen.  Similar to the original “Advertising Package 2015” the new document is reflective of the minimum-effort, one-size-fits-all approach typical of bureaucratic institutions and is, unfortunately, not very helpful.

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To advertise effectively, you need to put together your own advertising package which reflects your preferences and consists not only of the easy, obvious options from CILT, but also potentially competitive local options.

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