Where To Advertise Your Job
I was asked the other day where the best place to advertise for youth and children's work jobs was, and so I thought the best thing to do was put together a moderately comprehensive list of where you can advertise. Before you use any of these things though, you should consider seeing if there is anyone who already works or volunteers with you who could do the job. If you've got some really gifted and talented volunteers you should probably try to think of reasons why you shouldn't employ them. Training people up inside is always the most brilliant approach. That said, legally, supposedly if you don't advertise your job at least slightly and only let the person know you want to give the job to people could complain that the process was rigged for the person you've tapped up. I say supposedly because I've no idea the actual law there, nor how head-hunting could work if that was the case, but there we go. On with the list:
- Youthwork Magazine and Christianity Magazine, and the accompanying online listing Job Search Monitor. This is by far the best way of getting the attention of Christian youth or children's workers, as it's generally the first place Christian youth workers look when trying to find a job, even if they aren't the sort of person who'd buy either magazine. The rates are cheap for what you get (about £19 per cm per column for a full colour ad in both Youth Work and Christianity). Heck, I'd pay just for the online listing. The full details can be found online here (pdf).
- The Guardian Society pages and accompanying website. I know people in the world of secular youth work who swear by advertising in the job pages of the Society Wednesday Guardian supplement. If you want a candidate from the secular world of youth work it does get you the right people. They also swear at the Guardian though when they consider the price of the advert. Online only is £400 for a week and I can't even work out how much it costs in the actual paper.
- Evangelicals Now / Church Times / The Briefing / The Baptist Times / The Methodist News1. All run job adverts, and because they're all fairly niche markets you can target things quite specifically. You only want conservative evangelical candidates? Brilliant, then just stick it in the Briefing. You only want people who work near a cathedral and like to eat their lunch somewhere dry and have forgotten the book they were going to bring with them? Then you can advertise in the Church of England Newspaper.
- Colleges and Training Courses. Most colleges, come end of the year, will have some sort of job distribution type thing going on, generally an administrator e-mailing around current vacancies that they are aware of. Again, handy if you want to target certain varieties of Christian. Not so great if you want the candidate with twenty years of experience though. In a similar vein, some conferences and youth organisations have mailing lists that they'll put adverts in if you ask nicely. The Good Book Company has a list loosely based around people who've attend one of their youth conferences and Frontier Youth Trust have a similar mail-out as two examples.
- Church Networks. Various denominations have different networks which link up in different ways, and so I'll leave you to ponder how to best tap yours, but for us Anglicans,most dioceses have a diocesan youth officer who is a good person to talk to about advertising the job. Ian, who is a diocesan youth officer recommends this himself.
- Social Networks (eg. Twitter, Facebook) and Blogs. Apparently these are all the rage these days. But you'll be amazed at the way people will re-post and re-blog a job advert or send it along to their youth worker friend who is contemplating a career change. E-mail most youth websites and they'll put the job up for free.
- The Grove Is On Fire. I'll stick jobs up here if I get them through the system. Some caveats in place but essentially as long as the job you're advertising isn't lame I'll advertise it.
1 Insert "the Methodists have news?" joke here.