Attracting Top Talent to your SMB
Hiring managers! A well-written job description will do wonders for your hiring process
We are introducing a new series called “Attracting Top Talent to your SMB” with a goal to help organizational leaders find top talent through compelling, expertly written job postings.
At A Modern Way to Work, we’ve learned a lot in our 10-year recruitment journey that has allowed us to be successful and writing a high quality job posting is on the top of our list. We use an inbound-approach because of the highly compelling, differentiated nature of our postings that act as an advertisement.
This means we don't reach out to candidates. We’ve attracted a lot of top talent including Vice Presidents, Directors and even niche Software Engineers without ever soliciting a single candidate!
In this blogpost, we will show you our unique approach and how you can apply it to your organization to attract top talent. We’ll show you how to strategically attract who you want so you don't have to spend hours going through hundreds of resumes.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Introducing your organization & defining the scope and purpose of a role
Writing the position responsibilities through honest, clear and concise descriptions
Maximizing the “Who you are” section to describe your ideal candidate
Importance of including salary and strategically choosing the job title
Next steps?
Introducing your organization & defining the scope and purpose of a role
The beginning of your job description should be dedicated to introducing who you are as an organization, how you fit into the industry you’re in and what you’re trying to achieve. Once you’ve set this context, it will help position how the role fits into the organization, what its purpose is and how it contributes to driving business objectives.
To determine the purpose of the role, discuss with your team members why the need for the role exists. This step is often overlooked, as it can be really easy to assume what a role's purpose should be. You'd be surprised though, how easy it is for a hiring process to go astray because stakeholders aren't aligned on this key piece.
In getting alignment on this upfront, you can save yourself a lot of time and potential headaches further into the process. Start by asking yourself, “what is the ‘why’ for why this role exists?”and “how would this role add value to our team?”. People want to know their job has meaning and purpose so link it to that. Think of this “purpose” as the hook to attract your ideal candidate. They should read this purpose and feel inspired to join your organization.
Remember, defining a clear purpose of the role will act as the north star as you write the rest of your description and also when conducting interviews.
You’ll see below the introduction we wrote for our HR Consultant job posting. Notice how it touches upon who we are and what the purpose is for the role in relation to our organization’s goal.
Writing the position responsibilities through honest, clear and concise descriptions
Now that you’re clear on the purpose of the role and what it entails, you’re ready to start writing the “What you will do” section of your job posting. Most employers will simply throw in a couple generic bullet points in their job descriptions and call it a day but this does not set anyone up for success.
Instead, we recommend clearly defining the responsibilities by categorizing them into 3-4 main outcomes. Again- getting alignment on these with any relevant stakeholders is likely to make for a smoother process by providing clarity in expectations from the get-go.
Write a short description for each point that goes into the 5 W’s. For example, instead of only saying “Support the operations team”, talk about who will this person be performing this function alongside, what does it entail from a process perspective, what tools will they be using, what are the deliverables they’ll be accountable for or targets they’ll need to achieve, and what do they need to do to be successful in the process, etc. Be as clear as possible so that as potential applicants are reading this, they are able to picture themselves in the role to determine if they’d be a good fit.
Having a clear description of responsibilities can save you from trouble down the road by preventing miscommunication on scope. This section will also be helpful when conducting interviews as you’ll be able to form your questions around a candidate’s ability to perform each of the functions captured in the posting- after all, the best predictor about potential performance on something is past performance
Below is the “What you will do” section of our HR Consultant job posting that describes each function of the role. Notice how each function provides context, outlines the purpose and even provides the measure of success.
Maximizing the “Who you are” section to describe your ideal candidate
It's often in this section where employers will post a laundry list of somewhat generic traits that often could describe anyone. Strong team player, great communicator, ...do any of these sound familiar?
This section is where you are describing your ideal candidate as accurately as you can. Rather than focusing on listing qualities that could apply to anyone, we recommend focusing on fewer (4-6) and getting really specific about what you're looking for. Ask yourself “What competencies and behaviors would make this person successful in this role? at our organization?” “What do they value in their work?” “How do they feel about their career/the industry they work in?”. “What are they exceptional at?” Once you’ve determined these qualities, write a short description about how it applies to the role.
At AMWTW, we are an outspoken opponent of including years of experience and education level in job postings. This is because the majority of the time, years of experience don’t necessarily determine someone’s level of talent and can ultimately deter you from connecting with the perfect candidate who would add a ton of value to your organization. Instead of “10+ years of marketing experience” describe how a senior level of experience would apply to the role. Eg. “At this point in your career, you’ve likely lead a myriad of large campaigns with budgets over $5M…”
Remember, you want to attract your ideal candidate and repel others, so it’s important to be as honest as possible in this section.
Below is the ideal candidate we described for our HR Consultant role. What makes this great is that each quality written provides context into how it is relevant for the role. This also acts as a checklist for a candidate to visualize how much of a fit they would be for the role.
Importance of including salary and strategically choosing the job title
You would be blown away by how much time and effort you would save by simply getting the job title right and including the salary range in your job postings!
First let's talk about the job title. Now that you've determined the responsibilities for the role and who the ideal candidate is, you can now decide the job title. Think of the title through the lens of your ideal candidate as this will be what they look up during their search. Keep in mind that the title you go to market with does not necessarily have to be the internal job title. If the role is remote, include this in the title as it is a key determinant for many people!
By including the salary range in the job description you are saving yourself a ton of time and effort by only attracting people who are interested in your role with that salary. This means you won't have to spend countless interviews with candidates who’s salary expectations are well out of your range. Pay transparency also encourages equity and high trust at your organization.
When determining the salary for the role, consider the role first, not the person. This means instead of looking at a person’s years of experience, consider what value the role brings to the organization. Keep in mind that having a broad salary range has the same impact as having no salary range so, we recommend that you keep your ranges no broader than $10K (eg. $80 - 90K).
A combination of being strategic and open about these two factors will put you at a competitive advantage in attracting only those who you want to see, thus saving you valuable time in your process.
See below with how we presented the salary in our job posting.
Next Steps
Now that you have your job posting complete, you’re ready for it to go live!
We recommend posting on platforms like Indeed and LinkedIn to start off. Beyond the basics, get creative and think of where your ideal candidate hangs out. Think of specific job boards that apply to your niche. We recently recruited for a role within Web3 and found success posting on a crypto jobs board. For tech roles, you can consider AngelList or for nonprofit roles, check out Charity Village.
Make sure to screen your applications regularly as a single day's delay could mean your perfect candidate is looking at another offer, so make sure to keep the ball rolling at all times.
Decide ahead of time what you want your interviews to look like, who should be involved in the decision making process and what questions to ask during the interviews. Use your job posting as the guide to form your questions around. You might even ask candidates their favorite and least favorite part of the job posting.
We cannot stress enough the importance of having a clean and organized interview process. Remember, these interviews are candidates’ first impression of you so make sure to come prepared.
The true measure of a well-written job posting is the quality of applicants you bring in. The first few days or even weeks might not bring you the best candidates but if you give it some time, you’re bound to find that golden candidate. Have patience and when you find someone great, keep the momentum going!
This concludes our series for “Attracting Top Talent to your SMB”. You can find our entire series in our blogpost. Have questions about the recruitment process? Reach out to our HR Consultant Sohana Ahmad who was successfully brought onto our team as a result of this exact approach!
How can we support your recruitment efforts? Leave us a comment below!
