Post and pray
Coined by Aron Veraart
Definition
Putting a vacancy online, on your site or a job board, and then just hoping the right person finds it and applies. No audience, no message, no plan.
Aron VeraartUpdated Post and pray is the default way most companies hire. Someone writes or copies a job description, it goes on the careers page and maybe a couple of job boards, and then everybody waits. If not enough people apply, the answer is usually to post it somewhere else, or to bump the budget, and pray a little harder.
The problem isn't that posting is wrong. Job boards work for people who are actively searching. The problem is that posting is the whole plan. Nobody asked who the ideal person is, where they hang out, why they'd leave their current job, or what happens when they open the ad on their phone. So the job only reaches people who were already looking, and the ad has to win against hundreds of others that look exactly the same.
It's the thing this whole site pushes against: stop posting jobs, start marketing them.
Example
An agency has a hard-to-fill technician role open for three months. The ad is the internal job description, with twelve requirements and "competitive salary." It's been reposted four times. Nobody changed the title, the first lines or the apply form, they only changed where it was posted. That's post and pray. The fix starts with asking why the right people aren't stopping, not where else to post it.