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Peter Smith: Why Your Job Postings May Be Working Against You
Smith reveals the method The Retail Smiths use to help retailers and vendors write better job postings.
Peter Smith is an industry consultant, speaker, sales trainer, and author. He can be reached via email at TheRetailSmiths@gmail.com.
I saw a job posting for a salesperson the other day that got me thinking about the Mark Twain quote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
What Twain meant by this is: the more concise your communication, the more clear its intent. The longer your communication, the more challenging it becomes to extract its central message, given there is one to be found at all.
When I read the job posting, I imagined three or four people from sales and HR sitting around a table debating what ought to go into that job post so that every conceivable base is covered.
“What if this happens?” one might ask.
“Is it possible that we might need them to do this?” another might offer.
“Ah ha, what if conditions on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in February demand this?” says another.
Depending on each person’s respective orientations, the list of requirements grows and grows until all parties are completely satisfied, and precisely no candidates in the history of the world can meet all the requirements.
Related stories will be right here …
What Twain meant by this is: the more concise your communication, the more clear its intent. The longer your communication, the more challenging it becomes to extract its central message, given there is one to be found at all.
When I read the job posting, I imagined three or four people from sales and HR sitting around a table debating what ought to go into that job post so that every conceivable base is covered.
“What if this happens?” one might ask.
“Is it possible that we might need them to do this?” another might offer.
“Ah ha, what if conditions on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in February demand this?” says another.
Depending on each person’s respective orientations, the list of requirements grows and grows until all parties are completely satisfied, and precisely no candidates in the history of the world can meet all the requirements.
From time to time, we get asked by our vendor and retail partners to help find suitable candidates for key roles.
Understandably, they assume that since we’ve been around for a while, we might know a few people, and we do.
While we have no interest in being in the recruiting business, we have helped connect good people with good people and, occasionally, things work out for all parties.
It is, to be fair, easier to find some wins when it’s not your day job, as you really are coming from a place of what is absolutely best for all parties. But I digress.
In a seemingly counterintuitive happenstance, the higher the profile of the position, the less I want to know about it.
Not the job itself, I should clarify, but all the stuff a prospective employer thinks they need to communicate to fill it.
“When we emphasize the priorities over the noise, we make it easier for prospective applicants to know immediately which attributes are most important to success in the role.”
- Peter Smith, The Retail Smiths
In fact, I ask our clients to make a list of the five most important attributes for the position and rank them in order of priority, from most to least important.
That’s it. That’s all I want to know.
Simplifying your ask does not prevent you from deep exploration during the interview and hiring process.
It does, however, force you to confront not all of the things that matter, but the most important things—the things that, if we’re being honest, make the difference between a good hire, a great hire, or a dud.
When we emphasize the priorities over the noise, we make it easier for prospective applicants to immediately know which attributes are most important to success in the role.
That clarity of communication helps to mitigate the probability of misunderstanding.
As Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder than complex.”
So, the next time you have to write a job post, feel free to sound out everything and anything you believe might ever matter in the position.
Invite your HR, sales, and marketing teams to participate.
Ask your UPS guy, your HVAC guy and your Starbucks barista what they think. Perhaps your Aunt Mildred might even have an opinion?
Once you’ve done all that, take a pen and start crossing out stuff.
Delete what can be trained. Edit what is not critical.
Cut all the fat from the job description until you are left with the five most important things, and then put them in order of priority.
And post that.
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