Why We Support Has Job Posting Guidelines

I have some experience when it comes to career development and job searching. Prior to entering the tech startup world five years ago I had background working in higher ed as an academic and career advisor. Despite the shifts I’ve made in my career over the years I still enjoy helping others discover their true passions, revamp their resumes and professional profiles, and become more comfortable with job searching, interviewing, and negotiating. Understandably I was thrilled when the team at We Support asked me to join them last year.

If you’re not familiar with we support it’s a NYC based weekly newsletter geared towards professionals who have been or are interested in working in the Community Management or Customer Support industry. In addition to curating articles, events, and podcast episodes we also include job postings that our readers might be interested in. In a given week there are a ton of positions posted that would fall into the community and support sectors. In order to make sure we were delivering the positions that our subscribers would be most interested in to the forefront we became more discerning in the jobs we list.

We polled our subscribers to see if there were specific levels or job titles they were looking for. We also paid attention to which listings from previous newsletters had garnered the most clicks. This combined with our commitment to delivering positions from companies that compensate and treat their employees well laid the groundwork for the guidelines we as a team use to discern which job listings we post each week.

We Support’s Job Posting Guidelines:

• The job description and responsibilities seem rational and make sense to be listed as a community or support position. We don’t post positions that seem like multiple roles that have been mashed together.
• The position must fall within the world of Community (Community Manager, Community Content, Head of Community, etc.) or Support (Customer/Client Support, Tech Support, Head of Support, etc.). We post positions for all levels but since the majority of our subscribers are looking for senior level roles we give preference to posting positions that are senior level or higher. We also don’t post positions that are really social media manager roles since that isn’t what our readers are looking for.
• The job posting doesn’t use language that is sexist, gendered, or exclusionary.
• The salary for the job is a living wage. In 2018 the minimum wage in New York will be raised to $15 an hour so in this spirit we won’t post any positions that are less than $50K per year, when salaries are listed.
• We’re based in NYC and the majority of our subscribers are located there. We generally feature positions that are based in the greater NYC area or are remote. We do post some higher level positions at companies in other cities.

Since all of the contributors of We Support currently or in the past have worked in Community we felt an obligation to make sure the positions we were surfacing were the right ones for our community. Having guidelines not only around the types of positions we’re sharing but on work environment and compensation helps us make sure that we’re only sharing jobs at companies that are offering their employees the salaries and work/life balance that we would feel good about taking ourselves or recommending to a friend.

I always advise friends who are in the job search process to spend a little time looking at the descriptors employers use about the position and their company. A company may seem cool or have fun office perks, but at the end of the day you want to make sure you’re in an environment where you’ll be comfortable so you can really shine.

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