HOW TO WRITE JOB DESCRIPTIONS THAT ATTRACT GREAT CANDIDATES
A CASE STUDY IN STORYTELLING
I work with and talk to dozens of small technology companies on a regular basis. The mantra I hear most from their leadership is ‘we need to hire talented people – in every department’. But wanting talent and attracting it are two different things, and this is where most organizations fall down.
The way most companies present themselves as employers ignores an important concept: that exceptional people seek exceptional opportunities. You can rebuild your career page or streamline your HR process, but there’s no easier or immediate way to paint yourself as an employer of choice than to write compelling job descriptions.
But after four years of polishing *cough* rewriting job ads for fast-growth tech companies, I’ve come to the conclusion that most simply don’t know how to do it.
A before-and-after approach to improving your job ads
I’ve developed a kind of mental methodology for extracting the (compelling, challenging, unique) elements of a role – any role. I’m going to share it with you here.
I'll show you an original, deconstruct it, and then share a polished version. It’s a case study with a happy ending.
If you can plow through to the end, you’ll be able to analyze and extract a great description from a drab one on your own – without needing to be a writer.
Not only will you be able to do what I do, you’ll do it faster and better.
Why you need to write better job ads:
There are three basic ideas that underpin my approach:
- Ads should paint a complete and compelling picture of an opportunity, not the employer’s expectations.
- Great job descriptions interest great candidates. The better the ad, the better the applicants.
- Lurking in the humdrum details of nearly every job ad –– even yours –– is a story.
Case Study: Original
Marketing CRM Coordinator
This is the text I started with. It's drier than cabernet and you can skip it if you want. I'm going to break it down for you later anyway.
The CRM Marketing Coordinator is a key resource in sales and marketing operations, managing contact data and lists for hygiene and campaign development, website integration, and automated/manual rules implementation. The CRM Marketing Coordinator will use their expertise to develop solutions to optimize marketing and sales operations.
Responsibilities
- Administer and manage all aspects of marketing systems configuration (roles, profiles, record types and page layouts) and technical/functional capabilities, including all changes and potential system implications related to the marketing systems release upgrades.
- Audit, uncover and resolve data integrity issues and/or opportunities for process improvement. Perform automated and manual data maintenance as required. Develop and implement policies, procedures and guidelines to ensure the quality of data in Eloqua and Salesforce CRM.
- Actively work with marketing and business development to improve lead generation and qualification of prospects.
- Co-ordinate and execute online campaigns and e-mail marketing broadcasts, and provide support to create html content for different ongoing online campaigns, including developing list queries within our CRM and custom list building.
- Manage content and enhancement requests for [the company's] public website and client portal.
Required Skills and Qualifications
- 2+ years of experience and resulting business fluency working with CRM systems and tools
- Previous experience using marketing automation or campaign management suites
- 2+ years experience in website development and interface design, knowledge of HTML, mySQL, PHP, JavaScript, XML/XSL
- Undergraduate university diploma or any diploma considered equivalent
- Good knowledge in marketing, sales, services and business processes
- Command of MS Office tools;
- Good oral and written communication skills
Case Study: Breakdown
This is my methodology (presented here in the form of an 'inner voice') when I reconstruct a job. Chiefly, I'm looking for narrative hooks. The grist behind the gist. The 'story'.
"Reporting to the Marketing Manager, the CRM Marketing Coordinator is responsible for management of CRM and other sales and marketing systems, processes and operations."
I already learned this from the title, which means I haven't learned anything from the first sentence except that a marketing role reports to a marketing manager. The plot has not thickened.
"The CRM Marketing Coordinator is a key resource in sales and marketing operations, managing contact data and lists for hygiene and campaign development, website integration, and automated/manual rules implementation."
Operations has been mentioned twice now without me really knowing what it means.
Managing data sounds tepid, but what's this about campaigns and websites? That might be interesting.
Key resource! Now that's something. Especially for a junior position. Oh right, we don't know this is a junior position. Maybe we should.
"Administer and manage all aspects of marketing systems configuration (roles, profiles, record types and page layouts) and technical/functional capabilities, including all changes and potential system implications related to the marketing systems release upgrades."
Bueller....Bueller. I can almost hear a computer reading this. Did you get through it? I do like the word implications, this tells me the job will have a strategic element. *Mental Post-It*.
"Audit, uncover and resolve data integrity issues and/or opportunities for process improvement. Perform automated and manual data maintenance as required. Develop and implement policies, procedures and guidelines to ensure the quality of data in Eloqua and Salesforce CRM."
Audit? Good word. Uncover? Also good. Perform automated maintenance? Oxymoron.
In my head I'm starting to see a pretty cool position coalesce. "Key, strategy, audit, uncover, campaign, and integration" are not words associated with junior positions. But isn't this a marketing role? I still don't get it.
"Co-ordinate and execute online campaigns and e-mail marketing broadcasts, and provide support to create html content for online campaigns, including developing list queries within our CRM and custom list building."
BLAMMO! Not only do they 'own' customer data, they get to send it into the wild. This is a cool job! Lets help it read like one.
Nodding off? Lets skip ahead
"2+ years experience in website development and interface design, knowledge of HTML, mySQL, PHP, JavaScript, XML/XSL"
What? PHP and XML? How will they use that?
*Admission* I had to go to the recruiter in charge of this job to understand how these skills fit in. If you're in HR, you might have to ask the person who's hiring or managing. Here are my mental notes so far:
It says marketing in the job description but it's pretty technical.
It seems to sit between data and marketing, managing what comes in and segmenting what goes out.
There is the data equivalent of CSI work to be done. The kind of job where you snap on surgical gloves and practice your 'serious and determined’ look.
The data comes in from all sorts of places and needs to be classified
The job will connect to many other departments. The person won't be a shut-in.
For a junior role this has some pretty heavy responsibilities.
It's a pretty interesting job.
Case Study: New Version
Here's the introductory blurb of my rewrite. It is essentially my mental notes in sentence form. You can final the actual job posting here.
Note how it is aimed at getting the reader to feel like they are doing the job. The emphasis is on what they get to do, rather than what they have to do.
The biggest and richest companies on the planet buy lead-generating software from this company, so you’d expect them to be very good at spotting potential customers themselves. That’s where you come in.
This position sits between the company’s inbound data collection and outbound marketing efforts. You can expect plenty of challenges, and big, complex projects.
Your job will be sniff out patterns and trends in customer and ‘prospect’ data, then use your expertise to connect those tendencies to opportunities via sales and marketing campaigns. The integrity and richness of that data will be your domain.
The cleaner and better organized it is, the more prospects you can identify. The data will arrive from a variety of CRM sources – web, email, Salesforce, Eloqua and so on. You’ll use every CRM tool at your disposal, plus web forms (that you create) to pull in data, sanitize it, organize it (spray it with holy water, whatever it takes) and use it to populate outbound marketing campaigns.
Those campaigns will also be executed by you. SQL (for mailing list extraction) and/or HTML skills will be useful here. You’ll even have the chance to Photoshop images and influence messaging.
Reporting to the Director of Marketing, this position sits between the company’s inbound data collection and outbound marketing efforts, which makes it absolutely essential. You can expect plenty of challenges, and big, complex projects.
This is not a maintenance job in the dim corner of a data warehouse. It’s a chance to impact the company’s bottom line and grow professionally.
The rest of the description was left more or less unchanged.
Why it works
What I've done here is use key, career-relevant elements of the original 'responsibilities' section to paint a picture of a multi-faceted and challenging role. In short, I pulled the story from the details.
Writing this took me an hour. Yes, I have been a professional writer and have practice at this, but I'm not doing anything you can't. This ain't Tolstoy, comrade.
What's more, I don't have access to your internal resources (like the hiring manager), I don't know all sorts of details (work environment, team size, career ceiling, etc). Who knows how many other interesting tidbits lay outside of my field of vision?
What about the "people should want to work for me and not the other way around", argument?
Well, I believe that talented people do two things: They crave challenging jobs that will stretch them professionally, and they like to imagine themselves in a role. The more you help them do this, the better.
Will you attract a lot of lousy candidates too? Maybe. My advice for that is not to shy away from asking for exactly what you need. Good people won't be afraid of that, but lousy people will.
So that's my secret and my methodology: 90% of the jobs I see have a story buried in the 'responsibilities' or 'roles and goals' section. It's there, pull it out. You don't need me.
If I can do this with someone else's jobs, imagine what you can do with yours.
Trevor Stafford, Toronto freelance writer
A recovered ad writer and profligate tech geek based out of Toronto, Trevor now publishes an online magazine for fast-growth software companies. He can be reached at copywryter@gmail.com or followed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/copywryter
