How To Write Effective Job Descriptions [and increase candidate quality overnight]

Reading Time: 3 minutes

 

Morning all,

I’ve just been reading ‘The Sales Development Playbook’ by Trish Bertuzzi and it’s given me a brainwave that’s going to have applications across all of our recruiting.

This (btw) is the beauty of reading as a regular part of your routine. You always end up finding something that can change the way (sometimes entirely) that you do something.

In this instance – a couple of things came out of the ‘recruitment’ section of the book that has applications across the board:

Hire ex-military servicemen and ex-prisoners. They will have been used to difficult environments, structure and discipline – will have zero problems with resilience and hopefully can become excellent people to work with.

The opportunity with building strong relationships with recruitment officers within the MOD and HMP service overall could be massive. It’s nice to give people another chance…

And in my instance I don’t really care where people come from as long as they can do the job well.

Look at hiring university graduates is another consideration I’m mulling over. Approaching my old university (Warwick) and seeing what I can do to identify candidates from there that could come into entry level positions could be huge.

Specifically Warwick because it’s my old university and in the Humanities department (where I graduated from) – there are folks with lots of ability but perhaps lacking in direction when it comes to graduation.

And then the final element.

Pearl Lemon runs a rolling recruitment programme – and much like anyone else whose hired – we post job descriptions.

The way that we post them sometimes is by copy-pasting other people’s job descriptions and then posting them online.

However – the book made me recognise that if we spent a little more time building out the job and career opportunities with Pearl Lemon it could increase the calibre of our applications.

With this in mind – this is what I’ve sent over to my Head of HR for sweeping changes across our job descriptions:

• Massive career advancement encouraged.
• Ability to do the job is all we care about
• Success will be rewarded with recognition [via monthly awards]
• Over 500 hours of pre-recorded training programmes available
• Work with TEDx speakers
• Work with a funded startup ($700k raised)
• Get Pearl Lemon University certifications
• Lay a foundation for success with Pearl Lemon
• We have clients all the way from one-man bands to heavily funded startups to FTSE 100 companies and more
• Work with a team from over 15 countries, 3 offices and multiple languages

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• Clients based all over the world
• Heavy on the job training given
• Get laptop upgrades and speed and productivity training as a standard
• 75% of our leaders are promoted within and started in an entry level position
• Google “Pearl Lemon Placement Interviews” to see what our team say about us
• 4.6 star rating on Glassdoor from 84 write-ups
• Many of our team have said “they have learnt more with us in 3 months than their entire academic education” or its equivalent to 2 years at other firms
• 31% of FTSE 100 companies are led by CEOs who formerly occupied sales and marketing positions – so come learn sales and marketing with Pearl Lemon 🍋

Furthermore, what I’ve also done is asked her to identify every platform we recruit from and figure out which one’s allow video so I can record a video per platform with a strong message.

As you can see above – I’ve taken some time to think about what it is that could attract high quality candidates into positions at Pearl Lemon.

By mapping out all the advantages of joining the Pearl Lemon family – it turns a job description into ‘selling a position’ and will no doubt increase the number as well as the quality of applications that come in.

The fundamental point to underline here is this:

1. Sell what you offer; don’t just offer it.
2. Identify any supporting statistics about the role/your industry [see the 31% item]
3. List out anything that makes the team stand out
4. Quantify training/benefits where applicable

Do this….and you’ll shoot into the top 90% of job descriptions out there – and because they are benefits that are exclusive to your business – it’ll mean no one can compete with you

Catch you on the next one!