Craft Irresistible Job Descriptions: 10 Game-changing Principles!

All right. So I'm recording this video because I'm angry. And the reason I'm angry is because, number one, I have a bunch of friends and they're all like, I can't hire good people. Number two, I go look at their job descriptions and they're frickin terrible. You know, I employ 600 people across a dozen companies. The things I've learned over the past 25 years about writing job descriptions that not only don't suck, but actually are super effective. And this is a video about the 10 principles plus one bonus one at the end. That I have learned that have helped me get hundreds of candidates. Here, let me show you how this works. So I go in here to Indeed. I go look at the third one at random, and it's this job where they're trying to hire an attorney. Well, so the first thing I see here is this particular law firm, which we're going to blur out their name, has 2 stars, 7 reviews, lists the salary, which is good. But then you start to look at what they've put here, and it is the driest, most boring least attractive job description I've ever seen. The very first thing they do instead of speaking to the candidate or tell you anything that might be interesting to you is tell you about themselves. We are looking for new and experienced attorneys to enter in a litigation position in personal injury. You know, just the most boring stuff. And then my favorite part is they show here the name. Law Firm is a mid-sized and fast-paced plaintiffs firm with its main office in downtown Houston. Nobody who is a fast-paced firm writes this boring of a memo. But like, as I go look at all these job descriptions, they all suck just like this. Like they're super boring. They don't speak to any candidate and like they don't pass the simple test of would an A-player, like a really good candidate, sign up for this job based on this job description? So this right here, I'm gonna walk through all these principles, but I'm gonna use a job posting that I wrote last fall and we used it to get hundreds of candidates, almost all of whom were qualified or overqualified for what we were looking for. But we did it because we wrote a job ad that was just really, really good. And then we did a number of the techniques and tips that I'm going to show you inside this job ad, and you can use those to produce your own. Basically, background here is this is a 4-person team that we have now. I've taken all of my social media content. I have 200-something thousand followers on Twitter. I'm growing on YouTube and all these other platforms, newsletter with 30,000 people. We've taken and turned that into like a production team and it's like a little business and we sell ads and all that kind of stuff to pay for the team, which I like. But we needed and realized that to produce great video, which was our next frontier, we needed to have somebody who was going to own that. And this job posting here is a one-pager ad that we put out. So I'll just give you an overview of it here again, and then I'm gonna go through the 10 principles that we use to make this great job description. The way this looks as you go through it is you have a job title, we have a bunch of different kind of categories and some text in here. We talk about ourselves, who you are, all that kind of stuff. Job responsibilities, must-haves, nice-to-haves, details about the job, and then next steps. And look, it's all one page. And this whole thing was really powerful. Okay, so let's talk about this role in particular. Principle number 1, make your job sexy. What you want is something that a smart person who is your ideal candidate is gonna look at that and say, "Man, this is a perfect job for me." I wanna exemplify this idea of making the job sexy through this job title we used at the top. And originally the job title we listed here was Manager of Video Content. And I said, that is not a sexy title. That is not something that is going to be appealing to a smart person. A great candidate is not gonna be interested in that thing. So we need to have something that represents represents more the magnitude and impact that this candidate's gonna have when they come in and take this job. And so that is why the name of this job is Head of Video Strategy. Is it the same job as the Manager of Video Content? Definitely. But does that title look like something a smart, ambitious person would want to put on their resume? Absolutely. So you have to think about how is a smart, ambitious person gonna look at this job description and the role that you're crafting for them and be inspired that it's gonna be, well, something that is gonna be aligned with their mission. Okay, so let's keep going through this, this job posting, and we'll back into principle number 2. What I do next here in the second bullet actually goes through something different, and it says who you are, which is entirely different than what most job descriptions do at this point. Remember the one we pulled up from the law firm? The first thing they did was start talking about their darn law firm. Like, who gives a crap? I don't give a crap that your law firm is in downtown San Antonio. Like, tell me what's in it for me. Tell me that you understand me as a candidate. And that's what this next section does. It leads with us trying to hook the right person in to be interested and read the rest of our job description. And so this section is really interesting. And notice what we did here. We said, you are a proactive, assertive, take-charge person who loves to think ahead. There is nothing there about where the job's located, payment, any of that kind of stuff. There's also no concrete things, right? We're not talking about like what your college resume looks like or what you studied or any kind of stuff. We're actually talking about how you're wired as a person. That's what sets great candidates apart from okay candidates, which is You want a certain type of person coming into your role who is wired a certain type of way. And notice we use those words. They're very emotional words. That is precisely the type of emotional wiring that we want in a candidate who's gonna come in and lead us through crafting this type of video strategy for us. Let's say I'm trying to hire an accountant. Do I want a proactive, assertive, take-charge person for an accountant? No, I want a rule-following, precise, organized person who's gonna be methodical with what we're doing. Principle number 3 is what is your why? Like, why should somebody take this job? When I came out of college in 1997, uh, it was a different world than it is right now because there were more candidates than there were jobs. The employers had all the leverage. America and the world has gotten so much more just economically viable. Their leverage has totally shifted to the worker. Candidates get to decide not only what they're going to get paid, all these benefits and all that kind of stuff, they get to choose a job that matters to them. And that's where this next section I think does a great job on our job description of talking about the opportunity. This is an opportunity for me to have a bigger why than myself, to do a mission that's going to be great for me, make me feel good, be great on my resume, all those kind of things. And then tie that into like meaning for the candidate. Let's move on to principle number 4. This principle is to be real. And the world has changed from one in which people go buy things from marketing departments. They don't trust those things anymore, right? They don't trust organizations anymore. They want to work and trust with people who are going to be real with them. And this is where you have an opportunity to describe your company and do principle number 4. And the way you do that is you be showing them the positives and the negatives, and you use real everyday language. That's what we did here, great, in this who we are. And so use normal language, talk like you're going to normally talk, and do that here. And by being real, candidates will, well, they'll realize you're being real and want to actually work with you, as opposed to just signing up for a job that's going to pay them so they can go home at 5 o'clock. It very clearly says who is not a fit. Right. For you to find the diamond in the rough that is the best person for your job using your job description, your effective job description should go through and rule out people who are the wrong fit. You could say here, and you see what we do and how we describe our company. Results matter to us. We have fun on an inspiring mission and treat people as humans first and foremost. Like very non-corporate loaded language that says this is how— this is our core values. This is how we think about stuff. Again, it's this idea of say who the job's not for, because by saying who it's not for, it clarifies and crystallizes to your ideal candidate that this is indeed the job for them. Okay, this next one's gonna be controversial. The principle is source smart people. And what I think is super important when you write a job description is I hire people to make decisions and I want wise people who care, they're gritty, uh, and they're smart and they can make good decisions. So I put language in my job description to try to attract those people. You're gonna be making tough decisions, you're gonna be owning things, you're gonna be smart, all that kind of stuff. Start to use coded language like we're looking for people who are intelligent and who can make good decisions and who care about what we're doing. And all of that kind of shows up in the language that we have here, especially in this what you'll do stuff, right? Strategize, architect, and manage— those are things that require brainpower, and you have the opportunity to source those people and filter them in by using the right language. Principle number 7 is leave them hungry for more. I see job description after job description that does something horrible. They're like 4 pages long, 5 pages long. Your job description is not meant to be a book. You don't have to put the whole thing in there. And actually what we do that I think is super like unique is we go through and actually try to reduce the words in our job descriptions. Like I fought to make this a 1-page job description. And the way I did that was by going through every sentence, removing words wherever I could, trying to make the sentences shorter, making them simpler and easier to read using 6th grade language. All of that narrowed it down in terms of the amount of words that I had on the paper to the just the essential stuff that we had. So it could be one page. And the real error that everybody makes is thinking that just because a book is longer or a job posting is longer or an essay is longer, it's better. Actually, the best essays and stuff are as short as possible, but no shorter, right? You want to get all of your core messages in there. Your goal with this thing is to leave them hungry enough and interested enough to do your next step. And that comes up with principle number 8. What you want to do is entirely different than that. You want to give very specific instructions, and there's two reasons you want to do this. One, it helps your process. Give people specific instructions, let them know how it's gonna work, and tell them what the very next thing is. Number 2 is its amazing filter. And here's the reason I like it. When somebody works for you, they need to be able to follow instructions correctly. And if you give explicit instructions in your job posting and somebody cannot follow those things, that is an immediately perfect way to filter them out so you don't have to worry about them anymore. And so here you see what we did here at the to apply at the bottom. Very straightforward. Email your resume and relevant portfolio to Ty with the subject line, your name. Like, we told them what subject line to use. You would be shocked how few people can actually follow that instruction correctly. For me, like, if I'm going to depend on somebody, they need to be able to follow the instructions correctly. So this is like a perfect filtering mechanism. So there are concrete next steps. Do this. And it's always at the bottom of the job description. And it goes to principle number 9: make the job accessible. And you notice here, like, we've built this company fully remote. And, and I know sometimes you you can't do a company fully remote. For us, if we can, I'm trying to hire from wherever the talent is. And in this case, we've made the job like it's fully remote. You work wherever you want. Like, I don't really care. Like, that all helps me to get great candidates answering my job post by searching wherever, like, the great people are. And that could be globally, as long as it's across the internet and a job that can be done across the internet, why the heck not? Right? It mean— means things are gonna be a little bit harder for me as a manager to maybe manage but like, who gives a crap? Give me great people over somebody in my office any day. And so I think that is a huge thing to make the job accessible to people wherever they're located. Heterogeneous teams made up of people that think differently from different backgrounds, they outperform, they're better. And if you can try to do that, that's fantastic. You get a great person and you build an amazing team around those folks. Number 10, with cell phones, smartphones, all that kind of stuff, they have become ubiquitous. It is immensely easy for somebody to take a 1-minute video of themselves, and submit that with their job posting. And so I have added this trick, uh, to all of my job postings, and it's a beautiful thing. So number one is there is no way that a candidate can review your job posting and then record a 1-minute video without at least thinking about whether it's a good fit for them. And number two, because you're asking for 1 minute of their time to do this thing, which is not much, right, to send a 1-minute video pitching themselves and they're fit for the role, Like, you know, that that's going to cut out all the people who really haven't even paid attention to the job posting or just clicking yes on every single apply on Indeed or whatever. Like, you cut those people out, right? And it becomes really a beautiful filtering mechanism that isn't that big of an ask for candidates. So I love this technique. Use the 1-minute video request and, you know, see how you like it. I like it a lot. It works for me. Okay. So I talked about all of these 10 principles. There is a bonus principle that I want to share with you. The principle that I like a ton, if you can do this, is to sit down and record like a 10-minute video with you and your team talking about the position. And again, it comes back to this idea that people today don't want to go work for corporations. They want to go work for great bosses with great peers that they can relate to. And there is no better way for them to get an idea of what that is in an effective manner than you sitting down with your team and just have a conversation like real people. About the role. You have an opportunity to just describe it and talk about what you're looking for, who's the right candidate, why the job matters, why it's important, how does— what does success look like. Those are all the things you can just knock out in like 10 minutes. And the good news is, because you've written a good job description and revised a lot and all that kind of stuff, you have a great opportunity to articulate those things. So that's bonus principle and bonus technique number 1. Bonus technique number 2, and it's not about the job description itself, it's about the COVID letter that you put with the rest of the job description. There is an unfair advantage of me that I put out a message and post on social media, hey, I'm hiring for this person, a lot of people who already know me will potentially apply, right? And that's what I saw with the head of media thing. I got hundreds of applicants who are very qualified. You could do the same thing by having a good written— a well-written job description. But the COVID letter and the things that you put around it, like when you put it on LinkedIn or you share it with your network, you have like a great opportunity to put some compelling text around that. And so that's technique number 2, that's a bonus technique. Like, write a very interesting job description that brings people in and ideally gets the people in your network telling other people in their network, hey, this is a great job description. And so here I pulled up one that I did for this particular announcement, and I emailed it to my network and said, hey, I'm hiring for this. It was put in my newsletter. I put it on LinkedIn. I shared it with all my friends. And we all expect candidates to write good cover letters. What this is, is you writing a cover letter for your business and for the job description to get other people excited about it. It'll work wonders. Okay, so into the story here. We used this job description. We hired a great guy named Dalton. He was one of hundreds of applicants and he was wonderfully qualified, passionate about what we're doing. Dude loves YouTube. What we wanted from this job description, Dalton has proven to be that, and it's all because we wrote a great job description. So I hope you enjoy this. Use these 10 principles. Tell me what you think in the comments below, and we'll catch you next video.