Here again is the P = A + U – S formula broken down into its component parts. Review it and then let’s return to our bad job ad example on Page 168. Let’s see if we can fix it using what we’ve just learned.
Clearly there aren’t any Brown Shorts described in the ad that could Attract potential candidates. There’s also nothing that increases the Urgency (Shoves and Tugs) someone might feel to leave his or her current situation. And this ad actually increases my Suspicion because it is in no way linked to employees’ everyday reality. So our formula tells us that
there’s a frighteningly low Probability that a currently employed high performer will exert much (if any) effort to apply for a job with us.
So how do we fix this ad? Earlier I said that an opening paragraph should talk about the candidate and not present a list of boring and narcissistic corporate mumbo jumbo. Let’s pretend you did a little digging with your recruiters and your current high performers, and you discovered some Shoves and Tugs your potential recruits are probably experiencing. You learned that in their current jobs they’re feeling Shoves in time wasted by people playing politics with blame and
finger-pointing. They’re also being Shoved because they’re working with low performers who spend more time picking apart ideas than developing solutions. And they’re not getting the Tugs from working collaboratively on teams that brainstorm and implement solutions because of the politicized and territorial workplaces they’re currently in.
Let’s further pretend that you’ve discovered the Brown Shorts in your own company and you know that high performers are:
Highly collaborative. They help each other out without being asked and without any expectation of recognition or reward.
Empathic toward customers’ and colleagues’ needs They don’t get angry or blame, they sincerely and earnestly try to understand and help.
You also know that low performers:
Want individual recognition. They don’t want to share recognition with the larger team.
Blame others—colleagues and customers—when things go wrong. They give excuses such as “I couldn’t get it done because …” or “It’s somebody else’s fault.”
In addition to all that insight, let’s assume this job ad is for a programmer and that an absolute requirement is a B.S. in computer science (this was required for the real-life ad). So let’s rewrite that first paragraph using our Brown Shorts in the following way.
Join the ACME Team!
Wouldn’t you rather be writing code than playing corporate politics? Did you get a degree in computer science so you could design amazing software or did you do all that hard work so you could waste time finger-pointing in a mind-numbing meeting? At ACME Corp. our thousands of computer scientists and engineers work together and share credit. In fact, glory hogs don’t last very long here. Nor do people who tear down others’ ideas instead of developing their own. When smart people collaborate instead of compete, amazing things happen.
If you haven’t had the chance yet, check out our XYZ Software that runs 87 percent faster than anything else on the market.
We also collaborate with our customers. We bend over backwards (and maybe do some flips) to make sure they’re happy. We don’t screen their calls—we love hearing from them.
We’ll be honest; ACME Corp. isn’t for everybody. If you hate collaborating and sharing credit, or if spending hours with customers annoys you, then we’re probably not for you. But if you’ve got a big brain and you’d like to use it for making cutting-edge software (and not for making excuses), then you need to apply. Now.
To be sure, this pitch isn’t for everybody. If a pitch like this doesn’t match your Brown Shorts, if it doesn’t reflect the
Shoves and Tugs that your candidates are experiencing, then, it’s useless. But for the imaginary ACME Corp., it would work very well.
As I noted earlier, don’t get hung up on this being a job ad.
This isn’t about job ads; it’s about recruiting pitches. Bland corporate speak gobbledygook doesn’t work when delivered by a recruiter, in a video, at a career fair or networking event, or posted on LinkedIn and Facebook. In fact, a bad pitch will get your company killed in the social media world.
According to our Global Talent Management Survey, employee referrals are the best source for hiring high performers. The best. I had two reactions when I saw the statistics. First, employee referrals work so well because they fulfill the formula (P = A + U − S) better than anything else. By definition referrals are authentic—how could they not be, since they come from actual employees. My second thought was that if we put the culturally specific and authentic messaging into our job ads and recruiting, we could improve their effectiveness as well.
By the way, there are some other people who are making the same points that I’m making here. In a 2011 study of 5,600 workers nationwide, CareerBuilder asked about factors that made people less likely to apply for jobs. The first three factors were failure to include salary range, unclear or nondescriptive job titles, and failure to include company name. The fourth issue, which is relevant to our discussion here, was a dull job description.
You don’t have to (nor should you) take my word for any of this; you should test it for yourself. At Leadership IQ we test these types of pitches for our clients all the time. We discover their Brown Shorts, build their Brown Shorts Interview
Questions, create their Answer Guidelines, and then we revamp their recruiting strategies, tactics, and messaging. We test every step. Parenthetically, while job ads may not be the only channel you use, they’re the best one for testing your message quickly, quantitatively, and inexpensively.
In another example very similar to the previous one, we used the organization’s original job ad as a control and then
conducted a split test with a rewritten Brown Shorts ad to see which performed better. For background, a split test is a simple experimental design whereby you run two versions of a job ad (or marketing brochure, landing page, or whatever), altering certain aspects in each to see which performs better and why.
The trick with split testing is ensuring that the samples are perfectly split without any sampling errors or contamination.
Once you get through split testing, you then move on to
multivariate testing—testing multiple variables simultaneously—
but that would take a statistics chapter alone to explain thoroughly. So we’ll stick to split testing for the moment.
We ran this split test with the original (or generic) ad versus the Brown Shorts ad, and these are the results (rounded numbers):
Job Ad Generic Brown Shorts
Views 10,000 12,000
Applications 800 500
First Round 20 60
Finalist 3 18
Offer 1 8
Accepted 1 6
Let’s summarize the results. The Brown Shorts ad received more views, meaning more people clicked on the ad and ostensibly looked at it, or at least quickly skimmed it (12,000 vs. 10,000). But the Brown Shorts ad had fewer people apply for the job (500 vs. 800). Clearly, when you write a job ad with some exclusionary language (like “we’re not right for
everybody”), you will exclude some people. But as I’ve said, your goal isn’t the grand total of applicants, it’s getting
applications from high performers who will be a great fit in your organization.
Now, while the Brown Shorts ad had fewer responses than the generic ad, the applicants it did attract were of much higher
quality. In fact, with the Brown Shorts ad, three times as many people made it through the first round of the hiring process (20 vs. 60). Sure, the generic ad got more people to apply, but they weren’t the right people. The HR/recruiting team had to do a lot more work sorting through all those applicants with a lot less payoff. Additionally, the Brown Shorts ad had six times as many people get to the finalist stage (3 vs. 18), which led to eight times as many job offers (1 vs. 8) and six times as many accepted offers (1 vs. 6).