A Product Leader’s Guide to Writing Compelling Job Ads
One of your core responsibilities as a product leader is growing your team. And this is not a passive activity where you let the recruiter do all the work and you just watch the candidates roll in. As a thoughtful and engaged product leader, you should be an active participant in this process. After all, this is the future direction of your team we’re talking about.
For this blog post, we’ll be focusing on one aspect of hiring: writing job ads (also known as job posts or job listings) for your open roles.
A quick note: If this topic is something you’d like to explore in more depth, be sure to check out Chapter 12 of my book, STRONG Product People, where I describe in detail where and how to find great product managers for your team.
Writing Your Job Ad: Simple Copywriting Tips to Keep in Mind
My blog editor, Melissa Suzuno, says there are a few copywriting best practices that can help you make your job ads more compelling. These include:
Make your reader the star
Instead of writing in the third person about “the ideal candidate,” use language like “you” and “your.” It’s amazing how this simple trick makes it much easier for candidates to imagine themselves in a role. After all, “you” is one of the most persuasive words in the English language!
Focus on benefits rather than features
Features (in the marketing sense of the word, rather than the software or product sense) are told from our point of view as the hiring manager or employer and often come across like a bland to-do list. But candidates want to know what’s in it for them—the benefits. So look carefully at anything you list in a job ad and ask yourself if it’s something a candidate would really care about. You want to make it as easy as possible for candidates to see themselves in the role and get excited about how they can contribute.
Use social proof
Candidates are savvy and they don’t just want to hear your sales pitch about why a role is great. It’s much more meaningful if they can hear from a peer. This is a concept that marketers refer to as “social proof.” Is there another person in this role (or a similar one) who can speak to the challenges and triumphs of working on this team? Sharing a quick quote or anecdote from an actual employee can be very powerful.
Writing Job Ads for Product Managers: Points to Keep in Mind
To create a great job ad, start by reading some job ads published by your company and those of other high-performing companies. Put yourself in the ideal candidate’s shoes—think about what you like and what you don’t like. What should you include to help the candidate decide to apply for your opening? If you’re curious to learn more about what candidates are thinking and how they’re approaching the job search process, check out this blog post on Product Talk that collected insights from several product managers. Here are a few additional points to keep in mind.
Be specific
Make sure candidates are able to get an idea of the company they will be joining, the product they will work on, and the people they will be creating the product for. Include your company values and purpose as well as your product vision.
Demonstrate your commitment to product discovery and other user-centric approaches
As a tuned-in product leader, you already know that user-centricity and empowered teams aren’t just buzzwords—more and more product teams use these concepts to define the way they work. And this is something more and more candidates are seeking out. If you’re committed to these ideals, look for ways to communicate this in your job ad.
Promote learning and development opportunities
Offering opportunities for professional development can help you attract growth-minded people, and you can communicate this by mentioning if you offer an L&D budget or stipend for employees. If possible, take it a step further than speaking about budget, though. Who are the product leaders in your organization (hint—that’s you!) and how do they approach developing their teams? You may not be able to include lengthy descriptions of this in a job ad, but you can link to a blog post or video where you talk about these concepts in more detail.
Be inclusive
There are many ways our job ads can unintentionally exclude candidates. For example, using gendered language like “he” or “she” (and even “he/she”) can exclude candidates who don’t identify with those genders. Using idiomatic language like sports or military analogies can be confusing for people who don’t come from the same culture. And some language tends to discourage employees from underrepresented groups from applying to a role. Check out the gender decoder to see this in action. I’m just scratching the surface here, but I highly recommend spending some time exploring the topic of writing more inclusively, especially when it comes to your job ads.
Take a product mindset to the process
Since we’re talking about filling product positions, I suggest that you test the ad before you run it. Show it to your product managers and the team you are hiring for and see what resonates with them the most. Based on their feedback, you may decide to adjust the ad before you run it.
Share the job ad widely
This brings us to where to post the ad. It should, of course, always be on your website. And it should be posted on job boards for product people, such as the one for Mind the Product. Some job boards don’t charge a fee to post ads while others do. There are also the big job boards such as Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn, and others.
Don’t forget to share your open positions with your employees—some may want to apply themselves or maybe they know someone who would be interested in the job. In any case, ask them to spread the news.
Announce the position via your company’s social channels—Twitter and LinkedIn can be very effective recruiting tools—and mention on Meetups that you are hiring. You can also reach specific communities, such as Women in Product or Mind the Product on Slack.
A Few Anti-patterns to Avoid
Now that we’ve talked about how to approach writing your job ad, let’s cover a few common anti-patterns of what not to do.
Copying and pasting an ad you found somewhere else
Don’t just do the copy-and-paste thing. I know that this might seem like the most efficient way to go, but believe me, you can do better. Define what you are looking for, and that’s easy to do with the PMwheel assessment.
Asking for too many qualifications
Be sure to reflect whether or not the position really requires 10 years of experience or an MBA. So many companies include requirements like this, and they miss out on some very bright people who might not apply as a result. I often hear from women, for example, who tell me that a job required three years of experience, so they didn’t apply because they only had two. This is in contrast to men, who will readily apply when they fit 70–80% of the requirements. So, my tip is to create a prioritized list of your main criteria you will use to filter the CVs by and not include too many of these criteria in the ad.
Extensively listing out perks
It’s a competitive market for talent and some companies try to compete by offering all the trendiest perks, like Blue Bottle coffee, gym memberships, free lunch, etc. If your company offers these perks, that’s wonderful, but it shouldn’t be the bulk of your job ad. Focus instead on more meaningful content, like your product vision or the impact the person will have by taking this role.
If you read through all of this, I assume you do care about finding the right people for the open positions you've got. But let me shine a light on the impact it would have if every product lead cared about this as well: More happy people working in roles where they can really make a difference.
So if that’s an inspiration to you, feel free to share this post with other product leads to make sure we’re all helping people understand what a role is all about and what they can expect when joining our team. Not only will this help your company, but it will make a huge impact on your team members’ careers as well.