The best communication

For a few years now I have not attended the meetings of joint owners of the building where I live. One of the owners, an architect, when he was short of arguments, would remark with nagging repetitiveness “There is obviously something very wrong if I have three degrees and a chair at the university, and I cannot make myself understood here…!”. The point is: is it enough to have the will to communicate and a cultural basis to be able to convey one’s ideas in the desired way? Publishing an advertisement is communication, but the impact of the message conveyed is often underrated. The text of the classified advertisement – comprising few words – must give the reader, who is often unknown, a set of elements of information which immediately produce a selection, inviting contact from exactly the desired counterpart, whether a company or a worker. I had already decided to write a few comments on this subject, and while I was walking among the exhibition stands of BIT I happened to come across one of the greatest Italian experts in personnel recruitment for tourist facilities. The topic came up in our conversation, and he stressed the importance of classified advertisements both in their form and in their substance, including the text and the visual layout of the message, using whenever possible the company logo as well. Sometimes. in the texts of advertisements, you find the very opposite – marketing operations seeking workers which give the impression to be offering holidays instead of jobs, other proposals which provide no indications or elements for appraisal, arousing no interest in the readers. Although this is our professional field, we inadvertently caused a misunderstanding ourselves, because we took certain elements for granted and issued an unclear communication. In a box, near an article on a temporary employment agency, we wrote “From the 30th of November to the 3rd of December you will find us at stand A12 at SIA in Rimini”. We took it for granted that it was assumed it was us, Job in Tourism, writing. It was not so. Nearly all readers understood that the temporary employment agency was the one due to participate in SIA, and contacted them for appointments. We have been much more careful ever since, even in the most ordinary communications. It is certainly no ordinary task to be able to recruit the best resources. These are favourable times for tourism, but growing competitiveness demands that every step of the production process be given the greatest attention. Settling on inadequate solutions to avoid the effort of a thorough research may be a choice that does not pay.