How to write job postings that work | Johnny Campbell & Katrina Kibben

Foreign. Hello again, it's Johnny Campbell here, your host for today's Shortlist. The Shortlist is a weekly show where we bring on guests from the talent industry to tell us what's going on in the world today, what their insight and expertise is. And we hopefully teach you some something or make you think about something that helps you in your role as a talent leader. Today is a big day. It's a huge day. Something important is happening today. And yes, it's our guest. But of course there's also a big election in the US and we're going to try and make this a no election zone. I can't guarantee anything because our guest is vocal and she will speak about whatever the heck she wants to. I think you'll enjoy that. So no promises, but as usual, we'd love to those of you listening live to put in your questions, your comments please, hopefully around today's topic, which is how to write killer job posts. That is the topic today. Something that many of you might think is, oh gosh, you know, I've done this before. But trust me, you're going to learn a lot from today's guest and you're going to walk away with brand new insights that even if you're doing this 30, 40 years, you'll go, oh my, oh my lord, I never did that. And that's, that's a key thing you're going to learn. Quick reminder, by the way, the Shortlist, as I said, is a weekly show that goes live on LinkedIn and YouTube and a podcast that is available on Apple and Spotify. And wherever you find your podcasts, you can find a list of our back catalog and our upcoming shows@socialtalent.com the shortlist. If you're listening to the podcast, please take 20 seconds and give us a five star rating. Not a four star, not a three star, not a two star. If you want to give us a one star rating, just just skip it and don't bother. That will be most appreciated. So on with the show today. So joining me today, as I said, is a fantastic guest. We're going to be talking about the power of how to write job postings that work. And Katrina Kibben, today's guest, is one of the most recent experts we have had joined the socialtown platform. It's been an honor to have her in there. Her content is killing it. The last six weeks since it's gone live, have to say huge, huge, huge, big response to it. But how to write a free effective job ads is like for most of us recruiting one on one. And at social Talent, we've talked about job ads for years and no one's ever bought a license to social talent because they wanted to learn how to write job ads. I'm the first to admit it. But you know what? They learn how to write better job ads and they walk away going, wow, sometimes that's the most important thing I've learned. Right. Most people talk about how the fact that they're so important, but we put some so little effort into them. We're lazy, we've typos, we copy and paste all of this crap. Katrina, tell us about yourselves. How's how a professional copywriter ended up doing what you do and what exactly you do?

Absolutely. And thank you so much for having me, Johnny, both here today and on the social talent platform, because I think you'd be surprised to know that I have spoken all around the world and I have never gone into a room and had more than 1% of that room say they were taught how to write job postings. Yet job postings are the currency of recruiting. You cannot or should not hire without them. And so that was the end of the story. But that's definitely not where it began. I have been a marketer for HR tech companies. I've been a managing editor of a blog, and I've also been a CMO of a company. And I've sat in so many roles and I never once met a writer. But when I was creating this company, I had this big realization. And I know you're going to laugh at me when I say this, so my big realization, I was reading this book called the Story Brand. And the Story Brand asks you to come up with one universal problem. And I challenge anyone who's watching this to come up with one universal problem for recruiting that is truly universal. But mine is universal in that it's this. Hiring is hard. I know, I know. Not a big reveal, but the reason hiring is hard isn't so obvious. The reason it's hard is because there are a million variables we do not control. And the one variable we can control is how we ask. And that's why I started three Years Media. I want to teach recruiters how to ask, how to write. And obviously the primary thing, the one we keep going back to, is that job posting simply because of the frequency. I mean, 99 million job postings were shared last year. That's a lot of content and a lot of people making decisions about your brand without you ever realizing how many people see those 99 million posts.

It's funny, I think writing as a skill is so underappreciated. I was reading an article recently talking about presidents, because it's topical, of course, and it made a comment around Abraham Lincoln, saying one of the reasons why he's one of the most memorable presidents, of course, lots of achievements, is he wrote really fucking well. Like, he was a great writer. He's got so many quotes attributed to him. And writing as a skill is not just about attracting talent. Of course, that's a great application of the skill. But being a great writer means you can influence many, many people. You can. It is a superpower. And, you know, do you see it as that? Have you sat back and thought, I have a superpower because I can write?

I mean, not until now. I kind of love it, though. No, I know. It's powerful because that's how we connect. I think there's this. There's always been this idea that we have two versions of ourselves, that we have this professional version and a personal version. And often I think that's where writing went wrong in the first place. People were trying to be professional when in reality, we all just want to connect. And I think that's ultimately what great writers do, is they connect, whether it's on that one to one level or one to many, in bringing people together and uniting around a story and cheering someone on.

I want to get into some stories. I want to start with, as we always do, the news. And it was hard this week to find news that wasn't about T and B, but we've managed to find some. Nile, let's roll with our first news article. So, of course, apart from the obvious what's in the news this week, this one from Forbes was interesting and it talks about why hiring managers seek people with high levels of emotional intelligence. E I R E Q When you read this, Katrina, what were your thoughts? Did you agree what insights were interesting, what wasn't? Tell me what you thought about this article and why it's important or not important.

You know, I thought it was interesting from the perspective of it had some interesting biases, frankly. From my perspective, it literally outright said traditional, traditionally hiring decisions are made primarily based on a person's pedigree. You're like, and that's usually the problem with emotional pieces. This emotional intelligence and trying to hire for emotional intelligence. It is heavily laced with bias. Both outcome by. I can list all the biases, but I think that was really where I struggled with this, is that they talked about bias like it was Bible. It's fact we have bias like this. What'd you think, Johnny?

I did like some of his lines. Like I love what he said. You know, many he's demonstrated preference for hiring so called rock stars. And then he said, he went on to say who are borderline lunatics? Like that honesty. I was like, well, that is probably a truism. I've worked with rock stars who are absolute lunatics and they are, they are just destructive to an organization. I'm not sure. Like he kind of said like everyone's hiring for high IQ and it's great, right? Like not everyone has a high iq, let's be honest.

Right.

And I think not every role needs it. I think if you are in a role where you have to interact with people and influence people, then having a level of IQ is important. And the more you have to influence, the more you go up a leadership chain. For example, you're going to have to influence many, many people. And therefore having high IQ is kind of essential. Right? But if you're a doer, as long as your, your leader has high iq, that's, that's okay, you know, so I'm not, not sure about this. The whole world is moving towards high IQ because I think that alienates those who don't have a naturally high iq. I don't know much about this to understand can you build eq, et cetera, et cetera. You know, is it something that you just kind of, you have a level and you can work on it, but you're not going to necessarily double or triple your levels of EQ if that's how you measure it. So I thought that was a bit kind of, you know, not very well thought out, but I smiled. I get the point of it. I know it's more of a trend and it's jumping on the bandwagon of COVID around. People need to feel more connected and secure and that, that interests me.

And that's exactly why in order to capture this in job postings, I encourage people to talk about experiences instead of just listing things because most words do not have universal definitions. If I say collaborative, collaborative means something at Social Talent and collaborative means something at three Years Media. But it doesn't mean the same thing. It doesn't. And so what you want to do is imagine someone in that scenario. I usually do this a lot with customer service because of course we lean towards EQ a lot. Oh, we need them to be nice and polite and no, I want you to be the go to when things go wrong. I want it to Feel like a superpower. And I want you to feel empowered by that moment. That description, because that tells me you have the EQ because you connect on a value basis, not because I listed strong collaborative skills. Collaborative team player, top notch rock star. You don't know what that means. It can mean something different anywhere.

But isn't that the power of a story? And a story can be told in a, In a sentence as the famous. What is the famous. I think it's Hemingway about the. The baby shoes for sale, never worn or whatever, you know, and the story told in one line. I think, you know, we tend to put bullet points. I personally hate bullet points in a job spec. I don't know what your thoughts are on that because people tend to just put like basic information, 2, 3 words that make no sense or they make sense to them, I'm sure. Right. Somebody somewhere one day wrote those words and it makes sense to them, but nobody else really understands them. And I kind of hate that. But I think it is bringing the humanity is so, so, so, so important. And language. I'm going to bring that. If you don't mind, I'm going to jump to our next story because it really jumps into the language bit, which I think, yeah, you'll have an interest in. Katrina, and this is by Diana Booher. Apparently this woman's written 40 plus books. I thought in itself was fascinating.

Right.

But she talks about five steps to think clearly when you write. Maybe she doesn't think clearly. It took her 40 books to get it right. That's a separate issue. What did you think of this? Did you agree that these are the magic five steps that everyone should use to think clearly when they write?

I told you I was going to be blunt and to only expect that from me. So I'll say this. No. My issue with so much of this is how generic her language is in the first place. So she mentions the Persona, the reader. And I'm thinking, you mean the human, the person. I wanted that next layer where we talk about the actual experience, that moment when someone feels something. These broad strokes that we're so used to when it comes to marketing.

I did like one tip, which I don't know if you think it's a crap tip or not. Right. I liked it. Which was if you need a prompt, start with I'm writing to tell you that. When you finish the sentence, go back and delete that. I'm writing to tell you that. And what you have left will often work as a clear message sentence or two around can just Kind of get your core message before you write anything else. That type of advice. Would you give that to somebody? Is that good advice?

I actually tell people that they should write voice to text first. So do a brain dump first of exactly how you want to say it and then work into a structure. So I would have one step right before that that says, here's how I feel. Because that's the easiest way to inject tone into your writing. Whether you're writing an email, a job posting, or a blog. That's how you capture your voice, is by actually capturing your voice.

Why though? Why are people so bad at this? Like, this is the fundamentally most basic thing a recruiter can do. She has to start the process. Oftentimes, technically, you can't open a rec without a job description or spec, whatever someone calls it in their ATS or database or whatever to get it going. It's the core thing that all of us have to do, no matter what, what our role is in recruiting. Right. So why are we so fundamentally bad at this? Why are 99% of job ads horrendous?

Because most people start with their copy and paste finger. Literally the very first step. I think there's two reasons. The first one is literal copy and paste finger. I want to write a job posting for step one. Marketing director job posting example that never, never, do not start with your old version. Do not start with someone else's version. And number two is the one that I most. This is basically what my training is for, is that there's a block between people's brain and their hands. Yeah, I'd agree with that because I have spoken to recruiters. I mean, big companies, little companies, everything. You know, recruiters are very good at talking, right. But most of them have somehow convinced themselves that writing down what they say isn't good enough. And that's not true.

It's just, you know, you remind me of when I was recruiting in my agency days and I'd have my client job spec, and I would just do anything possible to not let the potential candidates see that. Like, no way am I selling that to them. No way are they reading that. That's them. And I just talk. And I remember some of the first training I did with my team back in the day was when they were struggling to communicate what the job was. I said just. Just what you said in the phone there. We write that down, please, because it's gold. You know, that works. And the people who would listen to me, right, because I wasn't a very good manager back Then maybe I was still not a good manager. That's a whole different story. The people that listened were better, right. And they got better responses. But is this maybe something in our heads that we just don't make a distinction perhaps between a job ad and a jobs description or job spec? Is there, is there a difference? And to you, what would it be?

Yeah. So the way that I look at it is it's a three phase approach. We start with a job description and that's the most boring version. I call it the brain, the hiring manager brain dump. Everything they say, everything they think they want, you can put it into there, but that stays in, in the virtual filing cabinet. It does not go on the Internet. I post a job posting which is a marketing version of the job description. The intent of a job posting is to make someone opt in or opt out. Literally. My only goal by the end of a job posting is someone says, yes, I can do the work, or no, I absolutely do not want to do this job. If I can accomplish that job posting. Excellent. Then there's a job ad. And a job ad is how you market the job posting. It can be a LinkedIn post. It can be a post sharing it on. Indeed. And paying for an ad. It's all the things that drive traffic into your post.

I'm going to, before I go further, ask our audience Listening live, those listening Live, if you're brave and you're up for it, you want some free consulting, send us a link to your job specs that you've posted and ask Katrina for some help. I'm sure we can bring them up and we'll have a quick look at them and Katrina can tell you, maybe without being critical, where you could improve, let's say, and get some free advice. Please do join in there. So this job ad, right, the posting and the ad. Talk to me about how much detail you should go into in either of those and what's the difference? And maybe even structure and layout. What are your recommendations?

Absolutely. And I recommend a very structured approach and I teach this in my social talent course. Highly recommend people watch it. Obviously a little biased, no. So what you want to start with is what I call a job pitch. In the job pitch, you are going to explain the absolute deal breakers. If there's anything that your hiring manager says, you know what? I won't even talk to someone who doesn't have X that goes into the job pitch. The job pitch also captures the impact of the role. We don't hire people for no reason. You should tell Them, why they're there, how they impact the company and how they impact customers. That's paragraph one. Paragraph two. If you have a big company, don't fight them, use their brand. About us. If you're in a smaller company, I want to say a human about us. Basically, it takes that little bit that you would put at the bottom of every press release and talks about how many people you hire, how many people you look to hire in the next 10 months, your big plan for what's coming next. Then you'll do a skill story. And yes, Johnny, I know you hate bullets, but we do include some bullets. No more than seven. Seven is where we see a psychological trigger where people of color and people from diverse backgrounds are stop applying. So seven is your max and you better get good at this. In theory, that list actually has a purpose. So it should have a little description that says here's what you can expect on a typical day. No one on this call is ever, ever allowed to say qualifications and requirements, ever, ever, ever, ever. Again. Last paragraph is whatever your lawyers tell you to do, because I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to be the final say on this. So if they'd like an EEO statement, if there's other legal requirements for your region, country, et cetera, that's what goes next. But we're aiming for 250 words and we're really trying to get people to opt in or opt out. And I love that we're seeing those job postings come in because I don't know if you know this, Johnny, but I used to do this. I would host an hour where people could just send me job postings and I would rewrite them. Why?

I love that. I love that. That's the big. I'm going to ask Niall when he's ready. Whatever is first, whatever you want to take. We've got some great posts coming in here, which is awesome. So Niall's going to try and work with us to kind of put them up there. We can go through them and I'd love to get your feedback on those. I love that piece, that advice. I love the science behind it as well. It's brilliant. When you talk about the seven bullet points. I didn't know that. What is your opinion on. And it's very old, so maybe it doesn't hold up anymore. Right. But, but the kind of F shaped way of viewing a webpage like is that still hold in terms of how you see people looking at, let's say a job posting and thinking about the layout and design, how they consume it on the. Kind of. On the. On the page. Is that still a thing that people should be aware of?

Absolutely. And that's why I encourage people to really tailor paragraph one and paragraph three. You know, if you have a brand team who's feeling very particular, don't battle on the about us, because we know that F pattern still is very true to how people read.

And I love that. The purpose piece in paragraph one. I've said it for years. Like, you start with that, whereas people start going into responsibilities. Oh, I said it right. But they don't do responsibilities first. No one gives a shit if I'm an accountant. I know what my responsibilities are. Otherwise, hey, I shouldn't be an accountant, right? But I want to know is, why should I be an accountant with you? Like, what's. What am I going to be able to achieve that I can't achieve elsewhere? As a human being in your organization, like, what is it that you'll do? Is your product changing the world? Is this team an amazing team who really help each other? Like, what is the extra thing that makes me want to be an accountant in your company, in that team? I think it's powerful. Like. Like, you know, I've looked at the psychology of this in the past. Katrina. And again, back to the science. Some of it suggested at least several years ago, using words like you, your, yours, telling stories, being specific around specificity. And that is all helpful. Again, would you recommend those things in terms of the way you write those paragraphs?

Yeah. However, what happens, though, when we tell people to be creative is that they bullshit us. So you, you are kind of dancing around what I always say about job postings, which is that they're one part psychological and one part tactical. So what I mean by that is that they're psychological in that we write for people, not about work. And that does not mean that you need to call them a rock star ninja like, you are not stroking anyone's ego right now. I need you to describe exactly what the job is. Tell people why people quit. If this is a high volume, low retention role, be bold, be honest, right? And then you can follow all the tactics that I've presented and really make sure that you're following through. But the only thing you have to remember is that we write for people, not about work. Don't lean into creativity because you're not sure of the details. Call your hiring manager if you're not sure of the details.

Niall's ready to bring up our first job spec I want you to have a look at and give us some suggestions on. So this is. First of all, thank you, Greg, for suggesting this. This is a senior technical support engineer with Genesis. Right. And again, just to be clear, 99% of us write job spec that Katrina is going to say, hey, you need to change it. So we're not trying to find, you're not going to find the most amazing spec out here. We're trying to find stuff that actually doesn't work because real honest people are sharing this with us to say, I, I'd like some help. Right? So first of all, everyone here writes Java specs that are failing. This is the way we all do it, right? So Katrina's insight is to give us, give us, give us guides and tips to be better at this. And those people who volunteer their job ads are here, they're exposing themselves to try and be better. And I love that. And thank you all. So with that preface, Katrina, tell us a little bit about this job and maybe Niall, you can guide us down and scroll down for the senior technical support engineer role.

Yeah, well, so first of all, hello to Greg. I know he's taken a few of my courses, so I'm going to give him a little extra grace. So as I'm looking at this, I will tell you I have some issues with the first sentence and here's why. Do you like working in a mission critical role? Mission critical role means something different to every single one of us. We were just talking about universal language. So if I were describing the impact of an engineer, it's not do you like working in a mission critical role? Instead, I want to tell them we can't solve complex customer issues every day without you.

I love that. I love that. What do you like about this first glance? He's got a video embedded in it. The structure, the paragraph structure with the bold headers. What's interesting, what works for you on this?

I really like the headers. So the headers he uses are what this role is and what this role isn't. I love that that's one of the easiest ways to make a job posting better is to have bulleted lists with categories that actually tell you what the list is about. I know that sounds simple, but it's an easy way to direct someone's eye to the information that they want. I really love gone into what some details about what you will do. My favorite way to talk about technical details and to really categorize is again, experience based language. So here's what I want to see when you're writing bullets about technical roles. You will use X tool to build Y. That helps. Okay, Use this tool. So that's the first thing we do is get specific about the tool because obviously we're not hiring technical leads who specialize in anything. Traditionally, there's a specialty you've used tool to build. Get specific. A database that distributes customer support requests, a grocery delivery app, a whatever. Right. You've used this to build this. And then impact again, Johnny. So we talked about that job itch having the impact. You need to talk about the impact of the build. Most people, I'd say 99% of job postings I read don't answer that. If I build this, what happens? How do I help people? And engineers are asking that question more than ever.

I'm going to ask nad to throw up another example. Thank you for that, by the way. That's fantastic. Thank you, Greg, for suggesting it. So let's have another quick look and maybe you can help describe what you're seeing on the screen for those listeners who are listening in on audio on podcast who maybe can't see the job spec. I would really appreciate that, Katrina. So tell us about this software engineer role here that we're seeing. And I'm not too sure who the person who shared this is, so maybe Niall's going to tell me in the chat to say thank you to that person. But Katrina, give us your critique of what do you like? What do you not like about this particular posting?

I was just going to say the first thing you'll see is my forehead because I had to lean in very close to read some of this posting because my eyes are not that good. Thank you, Niall. Appreciate you. All right, so the first thing I notice is the color and the imagery. This is not stock, and if it is stock, it's not frequently used stock. And I really appreciate that because it truly is the first impression of what we see when we're looking at a posting. All right, so as I'm scanning this, the first thing I see is that we're trying to layer job titles, and we haven't touched on job titles yet. But so what I mean by layer job titles, what I'm looking at on the screen is that they call it a software engineer at the very top. And then the first line of the job posting is Oracle SQL Engineer. Exciting, groundbreaking project. Now what happens is people try to create what I call transformer titles. We take every job title that we've thought of that this person might search, and we try to plug them into the job posting. Worst case scenario, they actually put slashes in between software engineer/SQL engineer/oracle Engineer, thinking that they're going to hit everything. And what you've done is create a very weird search string that no one will ever find. So if you're interested in learning how researching job titles works, there's a how to. But know that you need one job title. None of this slash, slash, slash stuff. And ideally that job title is the job title that drives the most search volume. Excuse me, the most search volume in your region. So the first sentence of this job posting I think can use a little bit of work because it is centered in the company value. So it's saying help us. What it reads is bring your expertise and it passion to us and in return we'll give you an amazing career with growth and learning opportunities. Right now I'll bet you money I could google that phrase and I could find it on a minimum of 100,000 websites. I'll bet you money, no joke. I'll bet you a drink next time you are here in the US that I could google that and find it exactly on over 100,000 websites. An amazing career with growth and learning opportunities. That's my problem with it. Sentence 1 Impact. You will help us build X that will help our customers fly.

Tell me about the details. Like this role here versus the first one. They've listed the actual package so the salary, the benefits right up the top. I read research from LinkedIn from their data science team that suggests for example, that women more than men prioritize understanding the salary package straight up in a job posting. And this role would seem to be, in that case probably going to be something that ticks more boxes more for women than men and is.