Writing the “Perfect” Job Description and the “Best” Job Ad.
Job Title
Abstract noun and at least two nice sounding adjectives…
Tips: String of keywords which vaguely relate to the actual job. Optimized to improve click rate. Ends with “manager” if the role doesn’t involve managing people. Ends with “director” if the role doesn’t involve directing people. To increase irrelevant job applications, throw in keywords like “ninja” and “master”.
Hook
This job is amazing so amazing that you will take a pay cut just to interview. Are you amazing enough to want to send us your profile in an abstract format while following multiple pointless tasks? If so, we want your bombastic self-promotional inquiry. We will get back to you after we decide whether or not to hire the twenty people that we are considering internally and via referrals.
We needed to prepare this JD to get a feel for “what’s on the market” and to ensure candidates in the process are further confused by what they are being paid to do. This job may even not be real. We sometimes need to create fake JDs and post ads to figure out how to use our time. We have a lot of spare time because of how difficult it is to hire people these days.
Tips: Helpful to include statements regarding how amazing the benefits and package of the company are to further drive the point that any meaning beyond pay should not be considered. Consider your target market and use wording that appeals to that group.
About Us
Our company is amazing. Much more amazing than any other company. We pay you to do things. We provide free food in an effort to get you to work more than you would otherwise. We understand that having your own bed, family and life is troublesome, full of minor irritations and frustrations. Avoid all of this, work with us. We pay well!
Tips: Do not talk about what actually happens in the company. Select from a range of positive sounding words like: supportive, cutting-edge, collaborative, etc. No one wants to know that your company is really just about making increasingly cheap junk.
Responsibilities
Non-exhaustive list of things you won’t be responsible for when you don’t get this job. Actual responsibilities will not be told to you once you join. You get to figure those out by yourself.
- Responsible for making people, who already don’t understand your job role and who have refused to cooperate with all previous hires, work with you effectively.
- Responsible for achieving completely unrealistic results which we have fired all previous employees for not achieving. When we say “fire” we actually mean “put under increasingly abusive pressure until they resign to retain their sanity”.
- Responsible for prioritising every work task over anything about your personal or family life (hobbies, children, marriage), while being told that the company is supportive of “work life balance” and that you are “really working too much”.
Tips: Statements should be clear, concise and sufficiently broad to ensure that no future hire or existing employee attempts to define their job scope by this document. Remember — the more confused they are about their responsibilities, the more you can expect them to do badly. Which is then a perfect excuse to fire them when they “don’t live up to expectations”.
Requirements
Incomplete, inaccurate list of requirements that you must fulfill. Even if you fulfill all of these requirements, we still won’t contact you for an interview because of that spelling error or the font you have selected.
- Must have at least 10 years total working experience since graduation with the last 20 years focused on exactly the same thing that we want you to do in this job. And you must be less than 40 years old.
- Must have a degree that wasn’t around when you went through school and have expert level understanding of tools which have just been invented.
- Must be able to accomplish tasks as an individual contributor while being a strong team-player. Must not be intimidating to your direct supervisor who has half you experience.
Tips: Requirements should be clear enough that only those people suitable will apply yet broad enough that you can have a wide range of options to choose from. Do not mention anything related to gender, religion, disability, eye-color or accents. You can always reject them after the interview (or viewing their CVs) because of “culture fit”. They won’t know the difference!
How to Apply
Prepare a detailed CV/Resume and Cover Letter and put it in the closest trash bin. Even though you don’t hear anything from us, we guarantee that we have not reviewed your profile and generally could care less about you as a person. Feel free to call us to check on your application via this phone number which no one picks up and which is likely disconnected.
Even though we have made it close to impossible for anyone to apply for this role, we get an enormous amount of applications. We value our employer brand so much that we will not respond to every application with anything useful and encourage you to never apply again, for any role.
The application period for this role ended last week and we are still posting the job description online to ensure that we get the best possible response. We look forward to hearing from you and building a one-way dependent, disrespectful relationship.
Tips: Make sure to be descriptive in how you want the application to look. This is also a good gauge on how well the person paid attention and read the job ad. You can use this as an extra means to disqualify people without even reading their email.
From the Author
I wanted to write this satire job description and job ad template with tips to highlight the ridiculousness of this area of our recruitment process. I hope it was entertaining and also triggered some introspection on how we have all been guilty of writing JDs for the sake of it without considering the people involved.
If you would like to take action based on my writing, I would recommend:
- Help me improve this writing by inserting comments to the google docs file.
- Learn about outcome focused job roles.
- Volunteer with or Donate to local training and skill-upgrading programs in your area.
- Ask me questions here or via Quora.
Thank you for reading me.
Originally published at docs.google.com.
