Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast, number 800, Advertising Jobs on the Internet.
This is English as a Second Language Podcast, episode 800.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
800.
I feel so old.
Transcription by CastingWords Additional definitions, culture notes, and comprehension questions.
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This episode is a dialogue between Wendy and Pedro about advertising a job on the internet.
Let's get started.
I've just heard that you're not going to use a recruitment agency to fill the new position.
No, I'm not.
There are so many Internet job boards out there that I think we can find good candidates without using headhunters.
But headhunters do a good job of weeding out people who don't have the right experience or qualifications.
Yes, but they also charge a large commission.
I'm going to post an ad on a few major job boards to see what happens.
Most of them don't charge a listing fee, so there's no harm in trying.
I predict you're going to be flooded with applications and it's going to take a lot of time to separate the good from the bad.
What do you mean?
You are my assistant, aren't you?
And your job is to assist me, right?
Good.
Roll up your sleeves and get ready for a busy week.
To recruit means to find someone to do a job or to become a member of an organization or So a recruitment agency is a company that goes out and finds people for you to hire, people who would be qualified to work in a position that you need to fill.
When we use the verb to fill F-I-L-L when talking about jobs, we mean to hire someone for a particular job, to find someone to work for your company.
So we might talk about filling a position.
The position is the job.
To fill it is to find someone who you will hire, who you will employ to work at that job.
Pedro says, no, I'm not.
I'm not going to use a recruitment agency to fill the new position.
He says there are so many Internet job boards out there that I think we can find good candidates without using headhunters.
A job board is a collection of different jobs and their descriptions.
It's actually more technically a place where you advertise jobs.
In the old days before the Internet, sometimes companies – and I know the government often did this –
They would put new job announcements on a physical board in some building.
And you could go down and look at the board and look at the new, we would call them job postings.
Because to post means to place a piece of paper or an announcement in a place that other people can see it, as on a big board or wall.
You could go and look at these job postings on a job board, which was a physical place, in a building that you could go and visit.
Well, nowadays, we talk about job boards on the Internet.
We mean websites where you can go and look for new jobs, because they have descriptions of new jobs placed or posted there.
Pedro says that there are so many Internet job boards out there, meaning in existence, that I think we can find good candidates without using headhunters.
A candidate, C-A-N-D-I-D-A-T-E, is a person who you are thinking about hiring for a job or a person who wants to be considered for the job that you are hiring for.
A headhunter is a person whose job it is to find a good person for the job you're looking for.
A lot of times, big companies don't want to go through the time of trying to find a good candidate to fill a position.
So they'll hire a recruitment agency and the people in the agency will go out and hunt or look for heads people who could work for that company.
Many times these are people who are already working at other companies.
The headhunter will approach them, will call them and say hey, would you like to work for this company over here?
That's what a headhunter does.
He or she is a recruiter, a person who goes out and finds people for jobs.
Wendy says, but headhunters do a good job of weeding out people who don't have the right experience or qualifications.
To weed W-E-E-D out someone is a two-word phrasal verb meaning to eliminate or get rid of the least desirable members of a large group of items.
To only keep the best ones.
We're going to weed out all of the... bad or not qualified candidates.
Sometimes we call them applicants.
People who apply for a job are people who want to be hired for a job.
And so from the verb to apply, we get the noun applicant.
So we're going to weed out the bad or unqualified applicants or unqualified candidates.
To weed out means to get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones, to look at those more closely.
Weed has a lot of different meanings in English, and I mean a lot of different meanings.
Take a look at our learning guide for some of those.
So Wendy is concerned because she thinks the headhunters would do a better job of weeding people out who don't have the right qualifications, the right abilities or skills.
Pedro says yes, but headhunters also charge a large commission.
They charge means they... make you pay.
You have to pay them a certain amount of money.
We call the amount of money that they get sometimes a commission.
A commission is a fee or a price that you pay someone to do some sort of service.
It's often a percentage of some other value.
For example, if the person's first year salary is I don't know 50000 and The headhunter may get a 1 fee or a 3 fee, meaning that you have to pay them 1 of their first year salary.
I don't know exactly what the percentages are, but that would be an example of a commission.
If you sell a car at a car dealership a place that sells new and used cars the salesperson you would get a commission.
You would get a percentage.
So if you sell a more expensive car, you get more money because you're being what we would say paid on commission, meaning you get a percentage of the amount that you sell.
So 10% obviously is would be more money if you sold a $100,000 car than if you sold a $50,000 car.
I've never owned a $50,000 car.
Certainly not a $100,000 car.
More like a $15,000 car.
That's my kind of car.
Anyway, Pedro says that he's going to post an ad on a few major or important job boards to see what happens.
To post, I mentioned earlier, means to place something somewhere.
An ad is short for an advertisement.
It's an announcement that asks you to buy something, or in this case, to apply for a job.
Pedro says that most of the job boards don't charge a listing fee, so there's no harm in trying.
A fee is a price that you pay for something.
A listing fee is the amount of money you have to pay to post your announcement or your message in a is used to show that you may not be doing something that is going to be successful but it doesn't.
Because there's no reason not to do it.
There's no price or no cost associated with it.
If something good happens, good.
If something doesn't, it's no big deal.
It doesn't matter because it didn't cost you anything or anything.
There's no bad thing that will happen if you do this thing.
That's what harm is.
Harm is a negative consequence of something, something bad that happens.
Pedro says there's no harm in trying, meaning, again, it's okay even if it doesn't work.
We haven't lost anything.
Wendy says, I predict I will.
Believe this will happen in the future.
I predict you're going to be flooded with applications.
To be flooded F-L-O-O-D-E-D with something means to receive a lot of something.
More than you can handle, more than you can take care of.
Applications are forms or documents or emails from people who want the job you are advertising, who are expressing interest in the job, who are applicants, who are potential candidates for the job.
Wendy says it's going to take a lot of time to separate the good from the bad meaning, the good applications or good candidates from the bad applications.
Pedro says that's where you come in.
This expression that's where you come in, or that's where I come in, or that's where he comes in is used to identify what another person's job will be in a certain project that you're describing.
So, for example, I have a lot of essays to grade.
I'm a teacher.
I'm a professor.
I have a lot of papers I have to look at.
And so I say to my teaching assistant, the person who is helping me teach the class, I say well, I have all these papers to grade and that's where you come in, meaning you're going to do the work.
Pedro is telling Wendy that she's going to go through these applications and weed out the bad ones.
Wendy says, what do you mean?
Pedro says, you are my assistant, aren't you?
Wendy says, yes.
And your job is to assist me, right?
Pedro says, good.
Roll up your sleeves and get ready for a busy week.
To roll up your sleeves, S-L-E-E-V-E-S. means to prepare to work very hard.
Your sleeves are the parts of your shirt or jacket that cover your arms.
So if you're going to roll them up, you're going to pull them back so that it's up maybe halfway up your arm.
The idea is that when you're going to work really hard on something, you may need to roll up your sleeves.
You may need to put your sleeves back so that your hands are free, your arms are free to work very hard.
The expression in general means to prepare, to work very hard, and that's what Wendy is going to have to do.
Now let's listen to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.
I just heard that you're not going to use a recruitment agency to fill the new position.
No, I'm not.
There are so many Internet job boards out there that I think we can find good candidates without using headhunters.
But headhunters do a good job of weeding out people who don't have the right experience or qualifications.
Yes, but they also charge a large commission.
I'm going to post an ad on a few major job boards to see what happens.
Most of them don't charge a listing fee, so there's no harm in trying.
I predict you're going to be flooded with applications And it's going to take a lot of time to separate the good from the bad.
That's where you come in.
What do you mean?
You are my assistant, aren't you?
Yes And your job is to assist me, right?
Yes.
Good.
Roll up your sleeves and get ready for a busy week.
Our script writer rolls up her sleeves every day to prepare excellent scripts for us.
That's the wonderful Dr. Lucy Say I'm talking about.
She's done all 800 of our ESL podcast dialogues and stories.
Thank you, Lucy.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2012 by the Center for Educational Development.
