I read a lot of job postings. Most of them suck. No wonder talented young people don’t fall over themselves to apply.
I’m endlessly fascinated by just about every business I encounter. The model, the strategy, the supply chain, the customer acquisition process, etc. I have a hard time understanding people who aren’t fascinated by it. Especially when they work there. Especially especially when their job involves recruiting others to work there.
Most job descriptions are functional and boring. They use tons of insider jargon, and rarely talk about what the company does for customers and why and how it creates value and how the role is a part of that. “The Sales Operations Assistant reports to the blah blah, and engages in strategic market research and lead generation activities to assist the Sales Team as well as cross-organizational processes involving the CRM and marketing automation platform.” Kill me.
Those things are all actually really cool! But an outsider doesn’t know that. What gets me is it’s written like even the insider doesn’t know it’s cool or what purpose it serves or why that purpose it awesome.
And you can’t fake it. Some postings realize the problem I’m describing, and so they try to connect to the ‘why’ of the company and show the softer, mission driven side. It comes off like a motivational poster. Trying too hard. “At Acme Corp, we care about our people, our clients, and the broader community impacted by our logistics support software. It’s about making the world a better place.” It’s like some focus-group wrote it under the influence of an HR conference called “Empathy and You: Beyond the Bottom Line.” Ugh.
But if you really, truly love your company it will come through. If you find it fascinating, it will come through. If you get excited about getting more awesome people to come see how cool your work is and be a part of it, it will come through. They will want to. It’s infectious.
What if a posting were more like, “This is a pretty awesome role. We’ve got all these business owners out there struggling to organize the products they sell. So we made a super awesome, easy tool that keeps track of it all so they don’t have to. The problem is, most of these business owners don’t know about it! So our sales team reaches out to let them know and see if we can help. They do a lot of calls and meetings to show them the software. But they need help staying organized too! This role is all about going through lists of businesses who might love our product, researching them, and figuring out which are the best fit, then helping the sales team find the best way to contact them. There’s a lot more, and you’ll learn it quickly when you join!”
Of course in a real company you could do much better. But I’m already excited about this role just thinking about it at this imaginary company!
If you want employees who love the company, start loving it more yourself.