How Much Gibberish Job Ads Can Get Away With?
It all started around the last days of the Summer.
You know it from the way you feel in the morning. The season’s over and no romantic Fall can hide the fact the Winter’s next.
I peeked around to see if I could find a job. Everybody must have dark hours at times. Soon I realized how picky, being my own boss made me, about job ads.
After checking a few ads I could force myself into. What a shock it was to find.
“Top companies pour top level hogwash on you in job ads.”
Ok, you don’t have to take my word for granted. Let the examples speak.
But first the method as I know how geeky, nerdy readers are around here:
- I selected the top five (5) companies from LinkedIn’s 2016 Global Top Attractors list for sampling.
- I looked up a job ad from each company. For the sake of measuring apples to apples, I chose jobs in sales or customer facing positions — as they were easy to find — and in Ireland. The latter is a no brainer since Ireland is a great country, filled to the brim with job ads from the top global ‘talent magnets’.
- I ran the intro or loose description of the job and company — the first part of job ads supposed to warm you up for the hard, factual parts— through my favourite bullsh*t indicator tool: blablameter.com.
- I listed the companies in descending order — better to worse, quoting the job ads for reference. For the sleepy you Salesforce was ‘best’ and Google ‘worst’ offender of straight talking.
- Giving you the company’s rank on the Global Attractor list (linked at point 1 above) between parentheses right after the company name. For further reference.
The rank
Salesforce (#2)
Position: Business Development Representative
Area: Sales
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Our Dublin office is the European Hub for the Corporate Sales Organisation. We occupy a state-of-the-art building in Sandyford, only 20 minutes from the city centre and immediate proximity to the Green Luas Line which brings you straight to the heart of Dublin! The office is a heaven of diversity and offers a great opportunity to work with people from all nationalities and backgrounds.
Department Description: (<OMITTED FROM ANALYSIS)
For Business Development Representatives (BDRs), every new and existing account is a prospect for business. BDRs also collaborate closely with their Account Executive to build a pipeline across multiple product lines.
Amazon (#5)
Position: Account Representative — Education
Area: Sales
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Joining our talented team as Account Representative, you will have the exciting opportunity to help support the growth and shape the future of a group of cloud technologies at Amazon Web Services.
You will be responsible for supporting and managing your Public Sector Mid-Market Territory by generating demand for the AWS services in both new and existing accounts.Your goal will be managing inbound leads, conducting outbound calls, opportunity discovery, and pipeline maturation and closing. This position is based in Dublin and we support relocation where required.
Apple (#1)
Position: [Non-English] speaking Customer Relations Advisor
Area: Customer Service
Location: Cork, Ireland
Lede:
Every day, people do amazing things at Apple. What will you do? At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there’s no telling what you could accomplish. The role of Customer Relations (CR) Advisor performs a variety of support for Apple Customers. As a CR Advisor you will be responsible for customer’s recovery and retention. You will handle various complex customer’s issues, will work closely and communicate effectively with different departments to ensure a successful resolution of each case as well as delivering best-in-class customer experience.
Facebook (#3)
Position: SMB Account Management
Area: Sales, Management
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Facebook was built to help people connect and share, and over the last decade our tools have played a critical part in changing how people around the world communicate with one another. With over a billion people using the service and more than fifty offices around the globe, a career at Facebook offers countless ways to make an impact in a fast growing organization.
Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. The Small & Medium Business (SMB) team contributes directly to this mission by connecting every small business in the world with their customers on Facebook, and then helping them grow through solutions like Facebook Pages and Advertising. We succeed when we help our customers grow their business.
People joining our team will have an outstanding opportunity to build client relationships helping to scale our sales and service model for SMB’s. Account Managers will leverage customer insights to help partners build their business using Facebook to drive success. The ideal candidate will have some prior advertising and/or account management experience. The role of the account manager will be to establish, own and manage an expanding portfolio of clients, focusing on driving revenue, product adoption, education and customer satisfaction. The ideal candidate will also have an appetite for identifying and executing on opportunities to scale services across other markets within EMEA. Success in this position requires strong consultative sales and analytical skills, a focus on client service, a consultative approach to sales and the ability to thrive in a dynamic, team-focused environment delivering against tight deadlines. This position is based in Facebook’s EMEA Headquarters in Dublin.
Google (#4)
Position: Associate Account Strategist, SMB Sales
Area: Sales & Account Management
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Businesses that partner with Google come in all shapes, sizes and market caps, and no one Google advertising solution works for all. Your knowledge of online media combined with your communication skills and analytical abilities shapes how new and existing business grow. Using your influencing and relationship-building skills, you provide Google-caliber client service, research and market analysis. You anticipate how decisions are made, persistently explore and uncover the business needs of Google’s key clients and understand how our range of product offerings can grow their business. Working with them, you set the vision and the strategy for how their advertising can reach thousands of users.
The Google Business Associate Program: Supplementing your core role, you will participate in a two year developmental program which offers world-class training, equipping you with the business, analytical, and leadership skills needed to be successful at Google. You’ll work with a wide variety of Small- and Medium-sized Business (SMB) advertisers, developing a strong network within the Google community, and a deep understanding of our products and customers — the real foundation of Google.
When our millions of advertisers and publishers are happy, so are we! Our team of entrepreneurial, enthusiastic and client-focused team members are the “human face” of Google, helping entrepreneurs both individually and broadly build their online presence and grow their businesses. We are dedicated to growing the unique needs of small- and medium-sized businesses. Our teams of strategists, analysts, advisers and support specialists collaborate closely to spot and analyze customer needs and trends. Together, we create and implement business plans broadly for every type of small business.
Let’s take things down a little bit with visuals. (Talent marketing fluff, spiraling out of control in nice, colored bubbles.)
My take away
While I am still waiting for some input on the algorithm used from Bern (maker of blablameter.com.) And I may never get a clear answer. My instinct tells me it is possible to quantify lack of clarity.
Worth to remember Peter Drucker’s quote:
“if you can measure it you can improve it.”
Note, the more the words in the text — save for Amazon — the worst they fare. Which embodies why keep it short and sweet/simple is a great advice in (copy)writing as well.
As Battelle states it — not everybody has the luxury to say no to jobs. Still I argue, giving up sanity for money is not the way.
People need purpose. If you can’t articulate purpose. You’ll have a hard time finding talent. Or the turnover will turn your nights into days. Or the quality of work will suffer. You choose.
What’s next?
Purpose at work fascinates me more and more. So I will explore the theme further.
I does not intend to bash on the copywriting skills of Human Resources staff, but to let questions raise and let us have space — between two laughter — to find better answers. Who knows, we may read less fluffy job ads at the end. Or have more meaningful works to advertise. What a beautiful world that would be.
This post is part of a series that seeks the holy grail of higher purpose at work, or even in startups, from a user’s point of view — can substitute user with talent or brand evangelist or whatever fitting at your will.
(Other posts’ lin will show up here soon.)
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