The kind of help wanted ad you write can help determine what kind of applicants you get. Write an honest, thoughtful, clear ad and you’re more likely to hear from candidates with those qualities. Spout a lot of buzzwordy nonsense and you’ll attract people fluent in bullshit.
We talked about this a year ago in A tale of two job ads and I was reminded of it again when Guy Kawasaki posted How to Not Hire Someone Via Craigslist. He remarks about the need to keep it real in job listings…
Write honest job descriptions for honest job titles. Don’t try to entice candidates with promises of greater responsibilities or opportunities than is true. And don’t delude yourself: If the cat drags in over-qualified candidate, are you really going to expand the job?
An example of a thoughtful, honest help wanted post: Software company Jackson Fish Market’s Four Realizations about Hiring. An excerpt:
As much as deep technical skills are critical for us, the most successful working relationships we’ve had over the past few months have been with folks who are incredibly professional, disciplined, focused, and leave their egos at the door. Attitude comes first.
The whole post is written in that tone. The first comment in response: “Wow! You guys sure know how to write a job ad!”
Kawasaki also wisely points out the job search works both ways, and that ads should reflect that.
Sell. Almost every help-wanted ad focuses on buying, not selling—that is, the qualifications that candidates have to meet and the fences that they have to jump over. However, in the war for talent, this is ass backwards. This ad, for example, should mention things like “award-winning shop,” “work alongside famous designers,” “interesting projects for Disney, Apple, and Audi.”
An example of a good (and amusing) sell job: Meetup’s doc on Working at Google vs. Working at Meetup.
Chris
on 30 Aug 07For the entry to mid-level folks, this stuff really hits home. The biggest mistake I notice is “technology” companies outsource their hiring to some recruiter who has absolutely no idea the skills or the tools. It’s like asking a complete stranger to set you up on a blind date.
Obie
on 30 Aug 07I just did a job posting advertisement for a Rails Developer along those lines on my blog and got a number of good applicants in less than 24 hours.
Ugur Gundogmus
on 30 Aug 07Thank you for such a great post.
2 years ago, I saw this ad in one of the webmaster forums: “I am looking for a PPC Manager in Toronto”.
I replied. A week later, I went to the interview. The interview was fine. But when they showed me the original job posting, I couldn`t believe it. They were looking for a Monetazion Guru and the requirements for the position were unrealistic (I think MG sounded better than a PPC Manager)
I told them that I was not a guru but just a PPC guy and I didn`t think there was a guy in this world who had all the skills that they were asking for.
I was hired and worked there for a year. I did a very good job as a PPC manager.
But, if I had seen the full job posting, I would have never applied for the position. Interesting, isn`t it?
FredS
on 30 Aug 07^Great name
Bret
on 30 Aug 07Why is it so rare to see a salary in a job posting? I understand not wanting to attract money-grubbers, but it’s just another way to make sure employer and job seeker on the same page.
sandofsky
on 30 Aug 07The issue with jobs on Craig’s List is that many posts are not put there to fill a position, but to see if a position can be filled with those specifications.
Toby Hede
on 31 Aug 07As a freelancer, I’ve come across some pretty bad approaches to hiring, and some that are downright rude.
Finding people is definitely a two-way street: I have to prove I can do the job, but the employer has to show that the job’s worth doing.
Jack
on 31 Aug 07The issue with jobs on Craig’s List is that many posts are not put there to fill a position, but for recruiter to collect resume. Craig’s List is more or less a resume collecting spam farm.
Rob
on 31 Aug 07I think that most people need at least a rough guide to salary just so they know that 1. They are not wasting their time 2. What the employer expects of them.
Anonymous Coward
on 01 Sep 07We went out of our way to write a help wanted ad for a standards-based designer that spoke very honestly and directly about what we were looking for. We posted it on the 37signals job board and were frankly astonished at the responses we got: it sounded like a bunch of corporate drones sending the same application to everyone. Most of them were even addressed to “Hiring Manager”— you’ll see how silly that is if you read the ad.
The way we finally got good results was to post the ad without any contact information except the URL of the ad on our site. That way people were forced to go to our site and read the ad: that simple step alone filtered out most of the people who were mass-mailing resumes. Now we’re getting much better responses. (This was on Craigslist; unfortunately you can’t edit posts on the 37s board after posting— despite the much higher cost.)
Jason Pontius
on 01 Sep 07Oops, didn’t mean to be anonymous there.
This discussion is closed.