Job postings: putting the fun (and the func) into the perfunctory

Our good friends on #EMchat had a conversation about job postings recently, and one of their members (thanks @BrianStudebaker) kindly pulled me into the conversation.

It’s been a while since I’ve crafted a sassy (or, as Brian more professionally puts it “Authentic and engaging”) job posting, but the last one I wrote helped Lawrence University land an outstanding director of admissions, Mary Beth Petrie. I could tell you what I posted, but since I’ve had too many English teachers in my past write “Show me; don’t tell me” in the margins of my papers (thank you Messrs. Horvath, Prosser, and Kearney), I’ll show you the post from 2012.

Job postings can be, well, as Will and Karyn acknowledge in their tweets, kinda “meh,” full of institutional platitudes and HR tropes as to become — like so many admissions search letters to high school students — virtually indistinguishable from each other.

Your choice of tone and supporting details can bring the personality of your workplace into your job description, giving potential candidates a peek into what might make a place tick (and what its tics might be). For us, it was important to check all the boxes of a typical job posting, but to attract someone whose values and interests align with our team, we needed to convey some personality in the process.

This worked for us, a place fueled by creativity, wit and hustle.

What works for you will require you to reflect upon what your team is like, and what you might want it to become.

Don’t be afraid to lay down some func in that perfunctory post. It might attract your next game-changer.