I am considering a job search.
Although consulting’s been slow this year, I haven’t entirely giving up on self-employment. But, in case I cannot make self-employment work, for they first time in nearly 2 years, I started looking at job postings.
Searching job postings is depressing. Most of the time they are written by people who don’t understand the role or don’t care about what’s written. They are a hodgepodge of copy/pastes from other poorly written job postings.
A candidate submits a resume (or worse has to fill in an online application) and then rarely ever hears back from a human.
Now that I think of it, the best jobs I’ve landed came from knowing someone, from internal promotions, from headhunters or from cold calling a CEO to pitch myself as a candidate.
I think I’ll save myself the aggravation by skipping searching the job boards altogether.
Instead, I’ll reach out to my network if I decide to go down this path.
If you are a hiring manager looking for a candidate today, I’ll bet you need to write a better job posting.
I’ve hired 100s of people for different companies. Many times I was handed an existing job description/posting to use.
Every time, the job posting was terrible.
- It was boring.
- It was too long.
- It listed every imaginable requirement that no candidate could ever meet.
- It never captured the key requirements for a good candidate.
So I rewrote them myself.
My suggestion is to start from scratch. Don’t bother trying to edit what you are given – it’s too much effort to try to polish a turd.
Start with a blank sheet of paper (or a whiteboard) and write:
- Why a candidate would want to work on this team. Don’t talk about the free food, the benefits and the “family first” values that are already highlighted on your website. Write about the work itself and the type of person who gets fired up by it.
- What someone in this role does. In plain English just like we are having a conversation.
- The key skills, experiences and strengths required. If a bachelors degree, a certification or a skill isn’t really important, then don’t make it a requirement.
When you finish the description, it should be short. It should make you and a candidate excited. It should contain no marketing buzzwords and no meaningless corporate HR speak.
I’ll help the first reader who sends me his crappy job posting to rewrite a good one – at no charge.
Good luck and good selling,
Steve