Podcast episode (Secret Sauce of Outsourcing, ep. 277) in which John Jonas explains a simple approach to writing job posts that attract good virtual assistant (VA) applicants — keep posts short, write them like an email to a friend, include a required subject-line action (e.g., role name - applicant name) to filter applicants, and offer templates at VAJobPostTemplates.com.
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 277. Writing a job post is not that hard. So people are often so hesitant to post a job because they're worried. Well, they're worried about the consequences of posting a job, which means, like, you might actually hire someone, or they're worried about doing it wrong or making a mistake. And what I often tell people is writing a job post just isn't that hard, and especially one that attracts good candidates is not that hard. Now, I recognize that I've done this dozens of times, so it's pretty easy for me, but I think you're overcomplicating it in worrying about not writing a good job. A job post's job is to attract good applicants. That's it. The job isn't to explain the role. The job post isn't to explain the role. The job post isn't to convert someone to your company. The job post is just to attract good applicants. That's it. Most job posts, or basically all job posts that I see are going to attract some bad applicants. They're also going to get. Not all the applicants will be acceptable to be shortlisted and you're still going to need to interview those who apply regardless of your job post. So whether your job post is super detailed and super long or it's really itty bitty and short isn't going to make a difference on what you have to do afterward. You still have to interview, you're still going to get crappy applicants, you're still going to get good applicants either way. Now, there are some things that you can do to make it easier or harder, but try this. Here's what I do when I write a job post, which I just did this this week. I write my job post like I'm writing an email to a friend. I'm looking for someone who can do blah, blah, blah, blah. And obviously I don't write blah, blah. I write what a couple things are that I want them to do. This week I wrote, I'm looking for someone that can write advertisements for these products that we have on social media accounts. The next line is, I'm looking for someone with blah, blah, experience. I said, I'm looking for someone with advertising and copywriting experience. Then I would write like, I'm looking for someone to work full time, part time, 10 hours a week, whatever it is. And then the last thing I do is I say make the subject of your application, blah, blah. So typically I will say make the subject of your application and then the role name dash, put your name here. So this week I said make the subject of your application advertising copywriter. And then in square brackets, I said, put your name here. Super duper simple job post. It's probably six lines long, maybe four lines long. It has the key thing which is make them do something in the subject to weed out crappy applicants. And you know, I get a lot of applicants doing this. I get really high quality people. I get some low quality people that I just get rid of. Pretty, pretty easy to write this job post. Now if you want more, if you're still confused, you're still concerned that you're not writing a good enough job post, go check out va job posttemplates.com va job posttemplates.com it is free job post templates that we have created and we give you good examples and bad examples in a whole bunch of different industries for job posts that you can make today, obviously. Super, super simple. VA job posttemplates.com.
