Ep. 3: Writing Your Job Ad

In this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of creating your job advertisement. This piece of content should be focused on marketing your job opportunity to your ideal candidates.

Transcript

Fletcher:

Welcome to the Hire Talent podcasts. We’re looking forward to this next episode. We want to segue from our last conversation about the difference between job descriptions, job advertisements and candidate profiles. We talked a lot about the candidate persona that we use to identify the person that we’re looking for and we want to target with our advertising. We talked a little bit about advertising, but this can be a tricky subject. Done well, it can have remarkable results in helping talent pools full of high quality high caliber type candidates.

Fletcher:

Not only that, it can help you build a talent pool of highly engaged candidate. So going back to our first episode, we talked a lot about the state of the current labor market, three point eight percent unemployment, more jobs than there are people looking for jobs. These are all great challenges we have. So what are we going to do? How are we gonna get people super excited about the opportunities?

Stephanie:

Marketing.

Fletcher:

It’s marketing, right? So job advertisement is a pure marketing piece. And there’s a lot of basic traditional marketing strategies that we use in our business to capture customers that we can use to capture the attention of our candidates. So going back again to our last episode, we talked about taking that really technical job description document, transforming that into something that’s engaging, exciting, interesting, fun, something that tells our story, our business, and of the opportunity. This is also super important for especially jobs that maybe aren’t all that interesting.

Stephanie:

Right.

Fletcher:

Right.

Stephanie:

Yeah.

Fletcher:

I mean, the fact of the matter [inaudible 00:01:46] a job’s a job. But not all of them are remarkably special or …

Stephanie:

Exciting.

Fletcher:

Exciting.

Stephanie:

You know? Sexy …

Fletcher:

Sexy. Yeah. They’re not all that sexy all the time. Right? So how do we create an unsexy job, and make it engaging and exhilarating for somebody who is thinking about making a career change or looking for a new opportunity. Right?

Stephanie:

I think recently, I want to say it was like a couple of weeks ago, I was doing some research on employee engagement, candidate engagement. And the statistics that I found came back at like something like close to 80 percent of people employed currently are either active … like 65 percent are actively disengaged and the rest are just kind of like in the middle. Like they’re not really engaged in their jobs. And so they highlighted the necessity of using language when you’re writing a job description, or a job ad in this case. Offer the candidate something that makes them … that’s personal to them, so they feel like they’re contributing, something that grabs that them, that engages them. So that’s what we need in a job ad, right?

Fletcher:

Yeah. Something that makes the job kind of a step up opportunity for them, that makes it … gives them maybe some greater social purpose. So …

Stephanie:

It’s like fulfilling.

Fletcher:

Yeah. As entrepreneurs, the big thing these days is kind of having a social mission in the business, so tying the purpose of the business to something that’s greater, for the greater good of society, or contributing to greater good, right? And so make sure that the job ties to that. And so use your social mission. You know, ours on the search side of our business is we’ll be able to place 100 professionals jobs that are exciting and rewarding and have great benefit to themselves as well as the people that they work with, their employers, right?

Fletcher:

So you know, that’s something that hopefully people can get a little bit excited about, right? Then you can come into an opportunity and just can help connect people with jobs that are engaging and fun. So advertising is telling that story, right? So a good place to start is share the core mission, vision of the organization. The core values. If you’ve gone through that exercise, it’s something that you can use not only in your recruiting efforts but to guide and lead your organization down the road. You can use that to help build employee engagement down the road, the stuff that we’re referring to, especially if you continue to revisit those core values over and over and over again with people on your team.

Fletcher:

You’ve introduced to them … introduced those to them in hiring process, and you’ve introduced that to them in [inaudible 00:04:58], and you’ve introduced that to them in your views and meetings, things like that, it can really help them solidify that engagement. Another really good way to advertise is tell the story. Tell the story about your business, tell the story about how your business has made a difference in somebody else’s life. Storytelling is a kind of a traditional sales technique, right?

Stephanie:

That’s something everybody can relate to.

Fletcher:

Lesson, yes.

Stephanie:

It’s easy to follow. They understand. They all like that the CEO wrote where he came from or why he started and his reason for starting. Somebody else can really identify with that. And they’re either aligned with it and are excited and want to apply or maybe it’s not the right thing.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my personal story is this is kind of a legacy career for me. But ever since I was a small child, I’ve been exposed to the importance of hiring, getting the right people on the bus. And even in high school I really enjoyed that concept and thought it super important. It worked in to be a leader and a lot of different activities and sports and clubs and other associations. And I never lost sight of the importance of getting the right people on the teams.

Fletcher:

I feel like that’s been very successful for me. But I share that story with everybody I’ve ever met since I was a teenager. It’s been my lifelong passion. So we’re looking for folks we hope to share that story with, hope those individuals that are thinking about joining our team and that they can understand that and get behind that idea, right?

Fletcher:

So sharing or mission vision, core values, sharing a story, a story about a customer that we’ve made an impact on, maybe achievement or an entrepreneurs role maybe on a smaller team. You can use that information. You can share your personal story. People can relate to you more personally as the leader of the organization. Also in this day and age, a good applicant tracking system, which is something that we’ve just released, is our rapid recruits tracking system …

Fletcher:

We’ll have a channel for you to provide video for folks, and to video. Yeah.

Stephanie:

Yeah, like of the company.

Fletcher:

Of the company, yeah. If you have a beautiful office, walking around the office, you can shoot some video, interview some of the existing employees. You can have them talk about the core values or the mission or their own personal story or their own personal story of making an impact in a client’s or customer’s life, right?

Fletcher:

So when you do those interviews, you’ll have a little bit of an agenda, be it that they’re telling a story or they’re talking about something that ties back to the core purpose of this. Right? So that’s critical. So, good applicant tracking system will help you set up a career page. It will help create a platform in which to distribute these short videos. If you have lots of different types of positions, you can do a video for each role, marketing, sales, operations. And each one could have their own. That will really help, again, help tell the story, help build engagement, make it more personable, to see somebody in real life who works there.

Fletcher:

The other big thing is if you focused on or if you haven’t got there, continue to focus on the reviews of your company.

Stephanie:

Branding.

Fletcher:

Do your branding. So if you’ve done a good job at that or if you’re just starting there, if you don’t have any employee, employer, brand, definitely should be something on your mind, your mind. But say, you’ve created some employer branding, you’ve gotten some real positive reviews on glassdoor or indeed, which those are the two biggest sites of both potential candidates as well as existing employees, past employees are going to go on, and they’re gonna leave reviews about you, the leader of the organization, as well as the organization itself, job, eligible compensation factors, the interview process, all of these things candidates are sharing online, right? Just like Yelp.

Stephanie:

Yeah.

Fletcher:

And love it or hate it, you gotta leverage it, you gotta take it to your advantage because otherwise people are just gonna leave negative reviews. And that’s gonna hurt your responses. So, if you have those positive reviews, send people to those places, direct them to these third party sources that are going to give people information about your organization in the hiring process, again, to get them excited about it, especially the younger generation.

Fletcher:

They’re looking you up. When they’ve got that that first interview scheduled, if the job advertisement was engaging, they’re probably pretty excited. When I’m excited about something like buying a new car or getting a new toy, you know, I go online and I read all the reviews and I check it out, I do some research and watch the YouTube videos about whatever I can find about this cool thing that I’m super excited about buying or doing.

Stephanie:

The more stuff you find, the more excited you get.

Fletcher:

If it’s positive, yeah.

Stephanie:

If it’s good and they’re good reviews. And a lot of candidates are saying great things about it, employees rave about working there, gets you more excited.

Fletcher:

I mean, before the first interview, the candidate in the perfect world would be so sold and bought in to the idea of working in your organization that nothing you could say or do could deter them from … Stephanie, you’ve done an excellent job of writing some advertisements and we’ve made some hires off of that. We have tasks in our company like cold call. Nobody likes that, right? Data mining, really boring kind of stuff that we do all the time. And then that’s a big part of the job of most … many of our jobs in our organization, not very glamorous, not super fun, but necessary. And these people, despite that, have been really excited.

Stephanie:

Yeah totally. Totally sold on the job by the advertisement they read.

Fletcher:

Yeah, what they’ve learned about the organization and hopefully getting to know the people in the organization. So that’s, I mean, that’s where it goes next. I mean, the marketing of the job never ends. It doesn’t mean that you shortcut your assessment process of the team. You still have to have a very good structured interview process that’s powerful and covers evidence about the person’s past successes and potential. You still have to take advantage of testing or assessment testing tools, which is our great passion to help uncover strengths and weaknesses for candidates, and to ensure that they’re going to be a great team player. You still have to do references and speak to those past direct supervisors to ensure that this is the type of person you wanna work with too, right?

Stephanie:

Right. Yeah.

Fletcher:

Because the candidate’s checking your references, right? So you might … definitely should be checking theirs, right? I mean, that’s the oldest most tried and true candidate assessment technique out there, period.

Stephanie:

Reference checking is?

Fletcher:

Yeah. Reference checking is.

Stephanie:

That’s a whole nother podcast.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Yeah. But we’re going to have a whole conversation about reference checking [inaudible 00:13:17], right? So job advertising, sharing your story, sharing your mission, your vision, your core values, sticking with just the core two, three, four, a major objectives of the job, spelling those out, explaining what those are and how those will be measured, makes it really nice for folks. Getting into the compensation part of it, that can be a tricky subject for many of us. We’re going to talk about that a little bit later on, but should you be posting the compensation range or should you not? What kind of connection, what kind of benefits should you be offering?

Fletcher:

That’s really gotten to be a big topic, especially with the affordable care act. Benefits are a big deal. So, that’s really the kind of last piece. So you know, you want to put together a story, you want to show those top two, three, four measurable objectives related to the jobs. You want to give some consideration to how you’re gonna present the compensation piece, which again we’ll talk about in more detail. You want to provide them resources to learn more about your company, so you can control that by directing them to your Indeed, to your Glass Door, to your career page, to videos …

Stephanie:

Social media.

Fletcher:

Social media. So if you really want to take advantage of all those things, then use the same tools that you’re using, when marketing to your customers, to build excitement for candidates. So once you’ve done all this, now you can begin to go out and create that candidate for … create a pool that’s stronger, larger, with more well qualified candidates than as if you had had not. So one of the things we’d love to have his guests. So if you’re an entrepreneur or a hiring manager and you’re having a problem or challenge in your recruiting process, so you have one of these less than desirable jobs and you want to chat about how to build a talent pool that has more A potential players in there, or whatever your challenge is, we’d love to hear from you.

Fletcher:

Also, make sure that you guys are aware of our kind of core services. We’re a pre hire assessment testing company. We provide tools to help you hire better, help predict on the job success. Recently, we launched our new rapid recruit applicant tracking system with our assessments fully integrated. I personally think the tool is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I say this from a long history of recommending and trying applicant tracking systems that weren’t our own. To our clients, it’s a must have tool for any business to recruit successfully.

Fletcher:

We also provide more in depth consulting services. So if you’re in need of a complete overhaul of your recruiting process, we’re more than happy to assist and help guide you through that process. And we also specialize in professional executive search, the lighting industry, professionals CPAS, as well as professional sales positions. So, we’d love to hear from you. Our email is info@thehiretalent.com. That’s info@the, T-H-E, hire, H-I-R-E, talent.com. Or you can reach us at 704-582-2730. We’d love to connect with you. Alright, until the next episode.