leadersBy Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ

Imagine you’re out on a date (it could be date night with your spouse, or a blind date with a total stranger, or whatever). Now, let’s say you really want to win that date over, become the only person in the room he or she can see or hear. We’re talking full-blown smitten here. How do you think you should start that date -- by talking about yourself, or by talking about your date?

Now, almost everybody gets the right answer in the date scenario. Of course, you talk about your date. But here’s the shocker: In the world of recruiting, a place where you also want to quickly capture the positive attention of another person, almost everybody gets it wrong. And it’s destroying a lot of recruiting pitches.

Let me prove it to you. Over 90% of job ads begin with a paragraph like this:

ACME Corp. is a top-tier solutions firm that provides information technology, systems engineering and professional services to customers in the public and private sectors. With 30,000 professionals worldwide, the company has the customer knowledge, technical expertise and proven performance to manage large-scale, mission-critical IT programs. With fiscal year 2010 sales of $10 billion, ACME Corp. is the third-largest company in our industry. Our vision is to be our customers' first choice in each and every market we serve. To earn our customers' trust and meet their individual needs, we will provide valued solutions with the best prices, products and services that make our customers' lives easier. But we're not finished. We're on our way to even bigger and better things. Providing superior customer service requires superior people.

Unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this opening paragraph is terrible. You don’t even have to read every line to feel the automatic turn off. This ad is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. In the blind-date equivalent of this ad, you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived. It doesn’t matter if you are recruiting one person or a thousand; the only way to grab a high performer’s attention is to open your pitch by discussing the issues that matter to them, and whether or not you can meet their needs.

Neurologically speaking, the opening paragraph of your ad (the first few seconds you have someone’s attention) are the most important. It’s during these first precious moments that your audience forms their opinions about you, when their brains decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to what you have to say.

The lesson in all this is, whether you’re dating to find the perfect match or recruiting to find the perfect match, always start the interactions by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction, and that you care about the same things that they care about. And if you don’t know what their interests are, do some research and figure it out.

This might sound like heresy, I know, but candidates really don’t care how long you’ve been in business or how many awards you’ve won -- at least not right off the bat. Is somebody really NOT going to apply because you don’t have enough employees or awards? Are they really sitting there thinking, “Well, I would have applied, but they only have 30,000 employees and $10 billion in sales, and I have a strict rule that I will only work for companies with over 40,000 employees and over $15 billion in sales.”

People care about whatever they care about, so that's what you need to give them in your job ad. Meet their needs, and you'll attract them. Don’t and you won’t.