20 Mar 2013/in Blog/by karmahireRecruiting has changed drastically over the past five years. Social media, job search engines, deep data analysis and automated testing have disrupted much of the recruiting world. What hasn’t changed? The job post itself. Lets be honest here, job postings are boring. They haven’t changed since the days of the newspaper classified ad. Text, bullet points, and cookie cutter descriptions that do anything but sell top candidates on an opportunity.
“Exceptional customer service skills”
“Experience with Microsoft word and Powerpoint”
“Organized and hardworking.”
Albeit, some companies are beginning to shake things up by getting more lively with the job description. Here are two creative job descriptions we love (from companies we also love).
Shopify writes some killer job descriptions, injecting humour into a oft-too humourless world.
So what is a Shopify Guru, exactly? Gurus are store-building wizards who help Shopify’s customers get their online shops up and running. Every new Shopify store owner is assigned a special Guru who they can go to for support. With close to 40,000+ Shopify stores worldwide, and 2,000 being launched every month, we need Gurus, stat!
Here’s a short list of the mandatory requirements for “Guruland.” If you answer yes to all three of these, this could be the job for you:
You’re comfortable on phones and can type like a mad-man. You have had a customer service job you loved and are all about helping people. You have a sense of humour. The Gurus are a fun bunch and we’ve promised them we wouldn’t hire anyone boring.
Woot.com is also a master of the creative job description.
In this role, you will apply a healthy balance of qualitative and quantitative analysis to those long, moonlight nights by the ocean, analyze historical data and industry trends while stealing the heart of a mysterious Parisian cat burglar who just can’t say no to a dare, and collect first-hand industry insights from existing Woot and Amazon buyers who are experts in their field, a field you might soon find yourself picnicking in if the Governor’s eldest has her way Synthesizing these inputs, you will recommend optimal deal opportunities to ensure the best customer and vendor experience, possibly while wearing a leather jacket over your shirtless torso and staring into the wind.
ZeFrank has a few gems as well.
Ideally you should know what the following acronyms stand for and be able to use any one of them to fix a leaky pipe in my bathroom: CSS, HTML5, PHP, AS (AS3, AS2), C++ (for mobile), and all sorts of APIs. You should know by experience that whatever you don’t understand you can learn quickly. You should be awesome at making JavaScript do things it wasn’t designed to do.
But despite the creative writing exercise, there’s still a glaring problem here. Job postings are advertisements. Advertisements that you pay for. As ads, they fail. People connect with images, style, and brand. Not just text. This has been proven by the advertising industry. And while copywriting is key, design and visual content is just as important. Adding visuals to your job post increases engagement and gives candidates more reasons to apply.
Hubspot gives 19 reasons why you should include visual content in your marketing materials.
The top 2:
1) 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco)
2) 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text. (Source: Zabisco)
These are some crazy numbers, but how many companies do you see with visuals in their job postings? We’re starting to see companies use visuals like infographics, video, and full blown landing pages in their recruiting efforts to stand out and attract the right folks. 75% of current job seekers are employed, and by getting creative you’ll have a better chance at converting those window shoppers into new hires.
