SEEK's ads - misleading?

[Moz]

To answer your specific question about the relationship between the number of jobs in the economy and the number of advertisements on SEEK, its a very hard question to answer for three reasons: the number changes every 15 minutes, some jobs take longer to fill than others (and longer than the 30 days ad length on SEEK) and SEEK has no actual way of knowing in any event.

I should point out that this discussion has never been about how many jobs there are in the economy - it's about how many jobs there are on Seek.

For each job, there may be one or many recruitment or advertising agencies, and one or many advertisements.

There is obviously no possible way SEEK or anyone can calculate at a given point in time how many recruitment agency relationships there are which might help you determine the number of actual jobs.

I feel that these statements by Carey make the "Legal Bit" irrelevant, regardless of whether it is seven foot long. Clearly the main part of the ad talks about "Jobs" and the "Legal Bit" talks about "postings", which is another word for "adverts". As Carey has made very clear in previous posts, there is no correlation between the two.

[CareyEaton]

I'm a bit confused now.

When I say "new jobs in the economy" I'm referring to vacancies.

You seem to be interpreting this as actual jobs which is nonsensical - why would anyone advertise a job that someone already has?

That would be illegal anyway under the Constructive Dismissal banner.

[CareyEaton]

With the vote, can we have a third option which is "Something else"?

[Pete]

I'll start a new thread when I have a bit more time - and will summarise a few experiences to put it in context.

I note you say there are at least 8 different ways your slogan "a new job every 30 seconds" can be interpreted. Doesn't this confirm it as misleading? (Concise Oxford "Misleading: causing to err or go astray; imprecise, confusing.")

A vote would confirm the most common interpretation put on the words you have used. If the majority interpretation is not the one that you have stated, it would inferr the statement to at best be confusing or imprecise and at worst misleading (intent remains to be debated!).

Cheers

Pete

[CareyEaton]

I don't think so. A play on words is not misleading according to your dictionary. We're not intending to cause anyone to go astray and I'm not sure there's any evidence anywhere that people have done so.

In any event, I believe Moz's original post was about misleading advertising, as by the ACCC, which has a somewhat different definition to the dictionary version.

[Kerry Larkan]

People interpret based on their filters (age, education, experience, culture, values etc) and so the poll becomes meaningless in my opinion. Anyone with common sense (sadly common sense is not that common) knows Seek and the recruitment sector play on words - spin their position. To believe otherwise is some what naïve.

[interestedobserver]

Hi

I have been reading this post with interest, and while I don't necessary agree with the definitions that CareyEaton has provided (I tend to think the ad is misleading), I am happy to accept his explanation and move on.

However, to add my two cents worth into the debate, I thought I would use some real examples from seek.

Have a look at the following link.

SEEK Job Search - Find jobs using multiple job search options

here, we can see three job ads which I think are identical (the clincher is the recruitment company reference number listed in the add - all the same number). Even if we accept CareyEaton's explanation that employers and agencies should be able to advertise one role in multiple formats, you could then potentially excuse the first one, but the second and third - they look like the same job advertisement to me.

In the past, I have also seen circumstances where recruitment agencies might periodically, say every week or so, relist every role they have, but then not delete the older roles that they had initially posted, thus leading to a duplicate, or they change a phrase like "inner city location" to "city fringe location".

I acknowledge that most of these practices probably wouldn't be in breach of the Trades Practices Act on misleading and deceptive conduct, but it is still conduct that I don't particularly like, and is very frustrating for job seekers...not that my opinion really means anything.