How to Write Job Postings that Work with Katrina Kibben

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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, check, 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, you know, the power of, of how to write job posting that, postings that work. And Katrina Kibben, today's guest, is one of the most recent experts we have had joined the social talent 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 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. I. 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. And 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 he's 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. 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. 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. 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 companies 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, more you go up the 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 da da, da. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 then 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, so like this job ad, right? The posting and the ad. Talk to me about how much detail you should go into in. In either of those and what's the difference, you know, 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 where 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 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 live.

I love that. I love that. That's, that's the big. I'm going to ask Niall when he's ready. Whatever, 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 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 look the 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? 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 this. 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, oh, I'd like some help. Right. So first of all, everyone here writes job 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. We'd 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 nal's gonna 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 gonna say the first thing you'll see is my forehead because I had to lean in very close to read some of this posting. Cause my eyes are not that good. Thank you, Nyle. 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. So 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 slash, SQL Engineer, slash 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's 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 a central thing. In fact it was the number one thing that women looked for in a job spec more than men did. Do you advise as much as possible putting in salary, benefits, etc. In a posting and if so, where should it go?

No, because I want people to opt into the work, not the benefits. If you want to change your pipeline, and there's a lot of science about this, both from Textio and frankly from my own experience where I've even used free gender bias tools, there's a free gender bias decoder, great price, free. And what I do is I put that last. So I write about the work, I follow the structure, define the role and then the last thing I do is run it through the gender bias decoder. And if you want, let's say this, that was the intent of this role, is to change their pipeline. Add in a female bias into the language and you can change the pipeline. I'm not kidding. I did this not even two weeks ago. I was working with an environmental company who wanted a female leader for their new sales team. They're creating a new division and they don't have any female leaders in sales roles. We changed the language, created that female bias in the gender in the job posting and they immediately saw a shift in applicants.

Yeah, it's a big thing that gender decoder. If you just Google gender decoder, you can see the original source code from the research paper that it derived from that talked about masculine and feminine coded words. And as you said, it's a great way to get started for free. There are perhaps reasons why you might spend 100 grand on a solution if you have that kind of money, knock yourself out. But all of us can obtain the base knowledge to get 90% of the way there. I think with some of these free tools. I'm going to skip on because I'd love to look at app job postings all day and get your opinion and we've lots more suggestions. Thank you those those of you who sent them in. But I've got a great question here from a user who's asked in particular what your advice would be. Katrina about a common problem to them anyway, when working with hiring managers who want to see the business jargon and kind of fusty business language in their job postings, how do you convince them that clarity and simplicity is better when they are used to their usual ways?

It's harder than I can really capture and especially based on your company. But here's how I look at it is one, recruiters need to do a better job of setting expectations during the hiring manager intake. And this is a constant problem. Whether you talk to somebody who works on interviews, job postings, anything, they'll tell you we have to start in hiring manager. So the first thing I would tell you is that we set expectations that we're doing this differently. And the reason we're doing it differently is for psychology and because tactically we know it works better. We have a ton of data about how we can remove obstacles for people from diverse backgrounds so that they can apply. We have a ton of data about how we can attract the right people. We're going to apply tactic with philosophy and be extra human because we want to connect on an emotional level. And then if they still don't believe you often, I will pull two job postings and put them side by side, not theirs. You can never use someone as the example when you want to teach a lesson. Then you're going to take those two job postings side by side and ask people who already have the job which job they like. Ask the hiring manager too. Hey, I was looking at these two side by side. Which one do you like? Get some quick intel and talk about how you have now the psychological. Right. You have that context to be able to tell them, hey, this is actually for us. We know that this style is for us because our people are responding really well to it and we know that the people we've already hired can be successful here. So why wouldn't we mirror their values into the world?

I love that advice. It's brilliant. You know, show them the examples. But critically, don't show them their own role side by side with an alternative because again, they're probably too close to that. They're too emotionally attached to that. Show somebody else. Is that exactly like theirs? The same type of role. And they can be critical of the other person's poor job posting perhaps. And they can reveal that they of course, would prefer the more human approach. That human piece you mentioned. Right. Writing for a person, not a Persona. And that's really critical. Right. I think people make that mistake. One, I'd love you to explore that a little bit more, what the difference is a person versus a Persona as it might be misconstrued. And then tell me if I'm a recruiter, if I'm a hiring manager, and this isn't what anyone else has done in my organization. Talk to me about the bravery that might be needed or talk to them through the decisions they might have to make when they're the first as far as they can see, to take a chance and write a different type of posting. So one just first of all, again, talk about the kind of person perhaps versus Persona as it might be misconstrued. Then talk to me about if you're a person in an organization and everyone else is doing it the bad way, the kind of way that Katrina Crippen says don't do you know, what does it take to be the first to try something different?

Yeah, you know, I probably should have said this at the beginning is that job postings are personal for me. And I know everyone's thinking, what do you mean job postings are personal for you? Well, they came up at a really personal time in my life So I lost my job three days before I bought a house. And it shake, it shook me. It shook everything. I was not expecting that. Obviously I thought I was buying a house, right? Clearly I wasn't expecting to get laid off. And I mean, when I found out I was closing on my house, two hours later, I found out I didn't have a job. And I got online and I looked for jobs and I was met with cliches, I was met with lies, I was met with exaggerations. People were saying they needed 15 years of social media experience and social media hadn't even been a thing for five years. And I always tell that story not so people feel bad for me because obviously everything turned out okay. I'm at my house, right? Like I started a company. I'm good. I tell you that because whether your story is as dramatic as mine or not, I need you to think of people because they deserve that level of consideration. In your life, when you decide that you'll apply for a job, you've done so much more behind the scenes. You've admitted that you aren't happy. You've admitted that you're willing to change everything to not be unhappy anymore and that you want a better life. And those are huge emotional things. You know, like that's not. And how dare we meet people in that emotional moment of opening themselves up, being so vulnerable to change, which is someone humans universally do not like. Right? I'm gonna rip myself open and connect with all of you and you're gonna post a template, you're gonna copy and paste. And frankly, if that's not enough for you, let me add on this layer. Who here remembers what it feels like to be a job seeker? To be at the absolute bottom of whatever decision making capacity to feel like you have no control over your life? If you remember what being a job seeker feels like, you'll never do that to anyone again. And you can feel free to steal my story. You can even pretend it's yours. I don't care if that works. Do that to change the process. But if it doesn't, I think the first step is always to talk about who you want to be as a company. Do you want to meet people at that emotional place with jargon that doesn't even work for you, Right? If you're going to take the self approach, fine. It doesn't work. We know job postings don't work. That's why agencies are doing so well and why we have to spend so much money on so many searches. This. It's because we never even told the story correctly in the first place. And again, if the emotional isn't your company's style, I get it. Then let's go into the tactical. Let's do AB testing. Start small on your high volume, low retention roles. Do some quick changes, look at one high volume, low retention role and run one of my human based ads against what you normally run and see what happens. Just see what happens. I can tell you right now, I've done a lot of testing over the last three years with companies of all sizes around the world. I don't mean to brag, but I have yet to lose that bet.

I love that, that, that, that story, Katrina, because it reminded me of a time I was, I was in a, I was in India with a team from Microsoft, a team of recruiters. And they were a bit beaten down, I would say, because they were being killed at the time by Google and other companies who were eating their lunch essentially for candidates, right? And in this part, I think it was Hyderabad. Like they'd open a big, big, big office block down the road and apparently Amazon were opening soon and they were just getting killed for talent and they, they were trying to find out how could we source more talent. And I was kind of, I stopped and said, folks like sourcing will get you so far, right? But it's not going to solve your problems. I said, first of all, why should people work for you? I'm kind of around the room and people kind of gave, you know, very mumbled, kind of inarticulate statements. And I pointed out something that I'd only seen that morning and I'd never seen before. Never a reason to look it up. And it was the company's corporate mission, which I discovered on the website, which was to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And I got them to talk about it. I said, dudes, your organization did this like you, you made the PC, you know, usable by everybody. You created this kind of, this operating system software. And whether it's the Xbox or it's LinkedIn or it's the word Microsoft Office and Word products like you guys actually enable the world to do this. This is an amazing story. What have these fancy startups done? They're full of promise and potential, but most of them haven't actually achieved much. Okay, Google, the exception there, right? But like, you know, they've achieved a bit. But you know, a lot of the companies they were being killed by, they just, they didn't have that kind of mission. And once they got people to realize and talk about this. They started turn that into, into content on again. I mentioned to them to your advice, lead with this, leave with the purpose that someone can achieve in the organization. Remind them that others have gone before them and achieved this purpose. And instantly they started receiving huge numbers of higher quality applications with words, you know, and, and this was coming from somebody that they knew as somebody who's going to teach them sourcing. I was like, listen, I'm going to teach you how to find better talent and I'm going to use the device. I think it's going to be most effective. And I think it's words in this case. And it worked. And I really speak to that. I think you can tell a story. You can. People kind of often think that what you're advising them to do is go out in a limb, be radical in the language you use. You can use the corporate language just in a way that's more human. It works.

Yes, exactly. This is not about breaking everything. I actually, what we talk about, you tailor that for you. You tailor that for your voice, your style. I work with paint manufacturers on the same days that I work for startups in Silicon Valley. The job postings are different, we don't use the same formats. Right. It has to be personal. And I feel like when you have, I call it big heart energy. When you apply big heart energy and you remember there's a person over there, there's someone whose whole life they're willing to open up to change their whole life because they're unhappy. I don't know about you, but that changes what I write down. It's not some blank on the other side. And obviously I get really emotional about this. It really bothers me that so many people start to write with a blank in their brain. And that's why I didn't like that article, is that it presented Personas as a blank. It's a piece of paper, a PowerPoint document, some template I bought off of some consultant's website. Like, screw that. If I can't hear them talking in my head, I can't write. Be inspired, let their voice stand out. Because the most powerful thing you have are people who stay and love their job. Their story is your job posting content.

I love that. It reminds me again, recently we have this focus in social talent. You know, we're the cobbler's children in some respects that, you know, we looked recently at our hiring process and realized we're teaching the world how to do it better. And some of our processes aren't good enough. And one of the areas we look to try and fix in the short term was our dispositioning. And again, you know, like most people, we use, you know, dispositioning emails as templates and we said, well, let's really make this human. And my colleague who, you know, well, Holly Fawcett, she basically wrote just one of the most beautiful, you know, dispositioning email templates I've ever seen. And, you know, she took the effort to write it, but it has scale and we input that into our ats and, you know, we're hiring for a bunch of roles. And instantly she started getting messages back from people going, you know, this, I'm in this really important moment and thank you. You know, you spoke, you spoke to me. And many of them knew it was a template. But, you know, it's remembering that it is personal to every person you're dealing with. It may not seem personal to you because you're working 30 racks, you're trying to fill them all, but it is so personal to every single applicant. And you got to remember that you got to be human and put the effort in. And on the plus side, it also works to find better talent. It's magical. Tell me, as we begin to close, what are some of the rule of thumbs that people should consider? What are your kind of, you know, general rule of thumbs? If you were to summarize some of those key takeaways, what would they be? Katrina?

Yeah, so I think the first thing is that we write for people, not about work. Remember, this is actually for someone on the other side. And I'm so proud and I love Holly, obviously, but I also take a lot of pride in those emails. So what I would say is it should feel like a one to one, even if it is at scale. That's okay, right? Be targeted about your segmentation, but that doesn't make your writing less human. The third thing I'd say is if you're having trouble with volume to a job posting, first thing to always look at is the job title. Do that analysis and understand. And the first thing I would say, just really quick, Google your job title and the word resume. If all the resumes that pop up aren't for your job, problem solved. I'd say the last piece is I really want people to target 250 words. That's the length of the average social media message. So we know that's what people want to read. So try to get down to just that much information. And yes, you still have four paragraphs and all of the details, but it forces you towards clarity. Is this the most important information? Are these the opt outs? And frankly, I think it'll be better if hiring manager intake because you know you have to drill down.

Wow. That being that concise is hard work, but hard work worth doing, I think. Katrina, thank you so much for joining us on the show this week. I want to ask you to perhaps close out the show with what we ask every guest and we add to our shortlist and that is the shortlist of advice. I'd love to hear your one piece of advice you'd like to leave our audience with today, our listeners and our viewers that either you have received during your career or you believe is the best thing you want our listeners and our audience to remember from today.

Yeah, if you wouldn't say something out loud, I don't want you to write it down. That's the ultimate test on your content. If you would not say it. It's not human enough.

It's funny, we just had this conversation in the Campbell household today about my eldest son and what he was saying on Discord to his friends. And my wife, who's a teacher, took him aside. She told me this an hour and a half ago and said if you wouldn't say it out loud, do not write it down on Discord and that. Use that golden rule. It's a brilliant rule for so many things. Katrina, thanks for leaving us with that piece of fantastic advice. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for helping out our guest contributions on critiquing their job Specific thanks for being part of the social talent family and being on our platform and keep kicking ass and fingers crossed for more results in our favor over the next 24 hours. We'll talk again soon. Thanks, Katrina.

Thank you.

And don't forget, folks, you can subscribe to our podcast at your favorite podcast player on Apple, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this podcast. And of course you can find out more about our upcoming shows and our previous shows@socialtown.com the shortlist. Next week we have another fantastic guest joining us. So as ever, we try to bring you inspirational people from around the world who can teach you new things, make you think, give you insight. And next week's guest is certainly one of those individuals. He makes me think all the time about leadership and management and that is Jason Laritson. Jason is based in the U.S. someone I met on the circuit, maybe gosh, eight, 10 years ago, and he always impresses me and impresses the audiences that he manages to speak in front of. They always walk away energized and educated. He's going to come and energize and educate you next week on how to manage remote teams. Such a critical topic right now. I think if you're a leader or manager right now, you need to be on this. You need to be listening to this podcast and show. Next week Jason will be joining us live. That's Wednesday 11 November. That's 4pm UK time, 11am on the east coast of the US 8am on the west coast, 11pm in Singapore and many parts of Asia. Or you can check us out as ever on your favorite podcast player or on YouTube and LinkedIn live and you can find all the links at socialtown.com forward/the shortlist until then. Hope you put that advice into practice during the week. Tag us on LinkedIn if you have new posts that you post that have Katrina's advice in there. We'd love to see them. Take care and happy hiring.

Sam.