Why I spent 4 hours writing this job ad
Every time I start a new hiring process, I spend from 20 minutes to 1-hour writing the job ad. I think (I hope) all Recruiters know the importance of this step. I usually follow simple and efficient rules like describing the responsibilities, the missions, the requirements… and all of that synthetically and appealingly.
In 2019, I had to start the hiring process for an Engineering Director position. At the same time, Morgane — in charge of Employer Branding, was working on a benchmark of innovative and creative ways of writing job ads, and I was curious to see for myself if stepping off the usual path would end up in getting more relevant applications.
For several reasons, I thought this role was perfect for a first attempt:
- I had nothing to lose because we usually don’t receive many applications for this type of position.
- The hiring manager, Kapten’s CTO, was open to try a non-traditional job ad (you can’t try something different if you’re alone in your craziness).
- The essence of the role was truly vibrant, meaningful and inspiring, which gave me great raw material (don’t try with a bullshit job).
- The majority of Engineering Director jobs advertised online at the time, at least in Paris, were honestly boring. We had a great opportunity to differentiate ourselves and stand out!
The job ad
First part: setting the tone and giving context
I wanted candidates to be curious after reading the very first words of the ad. The objective was to find a different tone, something that people wouldn’t read in a classic job ad. And I also needed to cover some important questions:
- Who are we?
- Which department are we talking about?
- How is the company structured?
- Why are we recruiting someone?
Second part: presenting the job
My goal here was to highlight the core challenge of the role instead of simply listing the tasks. I did three things:
- Finding the 3 keywords that would best describe the job (tech, strategy, and management)
- Explaining the day-to-day activity of the job in one sentence (in retrospect, the sentence “Your job will be…” is probably too long)
- Giving details about the people environment (your team, your colleagues, your stakeholders)
Third part: presenting the required profile
I believe candidates should be able to know in less than 10 seconds if they have the right profile or not by reading this section. My golden rule: the requirements should be yes or no questions.
Last part: giving candidates a reason to join
Kapten is quite a small company (300 employees when this article was written). We were starting to have good awareness in Paris but I couldn’t only rely on the company’s name and reputation. I needed to give candidates a good reason to apply by showing them how exciting the challenge was. All of that in our own spicy communication style.
The result
It was worth investing 4 hours of my time:
- We had 3 times more views compared to other tech roles
The job was viewed 1500 times, which is around 3 times more than our other tech job ads for the same period of time;
- 33% of the applications were strong candidates
We received only 79 applications but 26 of them were very relevant, which allowed us to move with a good pipeline of qualified candidates;
- 1 candidate was hired from our organic applications 🥳
Out of the 8 short-listed candidates, who went through the entire interview process… we hired one of them. And that’s, by far, the most important KPI!
Bonus
We received awesome cover letters! I didn’t expect so many candidates to play our game. Here is a selection of my favourite ones:
And last but not least… this one came from the candidate who got the job:
It was a successful first attempt and I might spend another 4 hours to write a job ad next time I have the opportunity!
