Thursday 16 January 2014

Advertising a Vacancy in the Key of C#

There is a problem with advertising a vacancy on a job board.  Not just the general problem of the decline in qualified candidates having to use job boards to find a new role but also the problem of standing out in a sea of other text all advertising the same type of vacancies.  How can you make plain text stand out when it's just the same as everything else?  Better yet how can you make it truly relevant to your target audience?  

If you take the time to look at what your competitors are putting on job boards you might notice some strange behaviours.  How many of the "adverts" are actually just job descriptions?  A job description and an job advertisement perform two very different functions and should look very different.  If you produce a job description and post that instead of telling a reader how amazing it would be for them to work for your company you're posting a list of demands in HR Speak.

This is the equivalent of a car manufacturer televising the turning pages of the technical manual, it's just so boring!  Stretching the analogy further an advert for a new job should be just as aspirational as for a new car - we want all the cornfields on fire, explosions and leather clad luxury of a car ad.  We want excitement, something that will appeal to the target audience and something that demonstrates that we, as an employer, understand them. 

Today I worked with one of our developers to write a job advertisement in C#.  What would have taken me an age obviously only took him a few seconds to write but the feedback was the best I've ever heard for any advertisement, after we finished he said - "I would apply".

We're currently trialing a number of different styles of advertising for our jobs over on our StackOverflow company page.  It's particularly useful because we can see both page views and applications so we're better able to judge the effectiveness of an ad.  I'm hoping this ad in code as well as other versions we're working on might encourage those that see them to explore a little further.

  1. using System;
  2. using System.Linq;
  3. namespace CriteoQuestions
  4. {
  5.     class Program
  6.     {
  7.         static readonly uint THRESHOLD = 5;
  8.         static uint Question(string text)
  9.         {
  10.             Console.WriteLine(text + " [y/N]");
  11.             string answer = Console.ReadLine();
  12.             return answer != null && answer.Equals("y") ? 1U : 0U;
  13.         }
  14.         static void Main()
  15.         {
  16.             string[] questionTexts =
  17.                 {
  18.                     "Looking for a new challenge?",
  19.                     "Want to work in the heart of Paris?",
  20.                     "Do you enjoy solving hard problems efficiently and creatively?",
  21.                     "Would you like to work where Big Data is more than a buzz word?",
  22.                     "Want to work on a product at true web scale with 30B HTTP requests and 2.5B unique banners displayed per day?",
  23.                     "Would you like to know more?"
  24.                 };
  25.             uint score = questionTexts.Aggregate<stringuint>(0(current, text) => current + Question(text));
  26.             Console.WriteLine(score > THRESHOLD
  27.                                   ? @"Contact m.buckland@criteo.com today"
  28.                                   : @"That’s a shame, you can learn more at http://labs.criteo.com/ maybe we can change your mind?");
  29.             Console.ReadLine();
  30.         }
  31.     }
  32. }

What other ways are there to stand out when advertising jobs online?  How can you make the limitations of plain text on a job board into advantages that will make your adverts stand out from the crowd?

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