Digital Marketing Job Descriptions Must Contain These Key Features If You Want A Great Hire

With the ever-rising influence of digital technology, the digital marketing industry continues to flourish, attracting attention and investment across the globe. And while this means that there are plenty of outstanding professionals eager to find suitable employment in the industry, it also means that every position will attract a lot of applications.

In some ways that’s a good problem to have, admittedly, but it makes a prospective employer’s task much harder. If you want to make the best decision, you need to give every candidate careful consideration, yet you can’t afford to spend too much time reviewing each application (AI isn’t quite ready to do it all for us, sadly!). How do you get the balance right?

Well, if you want to make the hiring process smoother and more effective, you need to start by optimizing each job description. The better you make it, the more relevant the average applicant will be, and the fewer applications you’ll receive from those wholly unsuited to the role.

Here are the key features that the description for a job in digital marketing must contain if you want the best possible pool of applicants to choose from:

A professional level of polish. If you want to attract top-of-the-line professionals, you can’t afford sloppy presentation. Your grammar, your phrasing, and your formatting must all be flawless. Skilled workers want to work in environments that will challenge them, and if you’re unwilling or incapable of getting a simple job description right, it won’t give the impression that your company is worth their time. You wouldn’t accept a poorly-written resume, so hold yourself to the same standard.

You don’t need to have supreme writing skills yourself: just put together the bones of what you need said and have a copywriter proofread and edit it for you, then run it past a designer. You may not have that many options (if you’re listing the position through a site for job seekers, for instance), but you can still eradicate typos and space things out properly.

Specific skill requests. The more vague you are with your description, the more speculative applications you’ll receive from people adopting the scattergun approach of applying to anything that isn’t obviously irrelevant. You don’t want to waste time interviewing people who turn out to know next to nothing about the core concerns of your business, so identify specific skills required.

You might ask for a solid understanding of HTML, for instance, or a decent level of comfort with Photoshop. It all depends on what specifically your company does. You should avoid requesting things that aren’t essential parts of your regular operations (plenty of things can be learned on the job, after all), but you should know what things a successful employee will need to know, so don’t be hesitant to state them clearly.

PREMIUM CONTENT: North America Staffing Company Survey — The Full Report

A description of company culture. Some companies push this kind of thing too far and end up making their job descriptions awkward and overly zany, so proceed with caution, but you do need to make some mention of company culture to find the right fit. If someone has all the skills you need but will rapidly clash with your current team, they won’t prove a valuable hire, while someone who suits the dynamic may well skill up in no time.

Try to cut to the heart of how it feels to be an employee in your workplace. Are you sticklers for rules? Passionate to the point of overworking? Do you like to handle your regularly-scheduled work and go home on time? Are you hotly competitive, or more collaborative? You might worry about restricting your options based on how you describe your culture, but it’s better to weed out the bad fits now than to deal with them down the line.

A link to your website. All too often, businesses stick with anonymity when creating their job descriptions, and you’ll see something along the lines of “This Seattle-based Fortune 500 company is recruiting!”. This really isn’t worth doing. Whatever you believe you’ll get out of keeping your identity secret, it will mainly serve to make you look needlessly cryptic and discourage people from getting too in-depth with their applications. Who can care that much about getting an interview with a mystery company?

So not only should you immediately list the name of your company, but you should also provide a link to your website so applicants can gauge your corporate style for themselves. Don’t do anything excessive like expecting them to memorize the contents of your site (believe it or not, that has happened) — just let them see it and serve as a strong indicator of whether it’s a position they’d be suited to.

A request for creativity. Basic resumes aren’t always avoidable, depending on the mechanics of your recruitment process. If you use an applicant tracking system, for instance, then it may require a traditional 2-page resume format to proceed. But if you’re going to pick out top applicants, you’re going to need more information that can be condensed to two generic pages. This is why you need to state in your description that creative resumes will be welcomed.

It’s one thing to someone to say “Worked as an Account Manager for 3 years. Ran an ecommerce business and managed to turn a profit within 6 months, then sold it for a healthy profit. Ran a successful blog with 50k monthly visits”, but it’s another entirely for them to tell the stories that accompanied those events.

How did they enjoy being an Account Manager? What were the highlights of those 3 years? What did the business sell? Why did they choose to part with it? What topics did the blog cover, and why? Is it still active? The context is what gives you the most important information and shows you a glimpse of their true potential, so be sure to explain that you expect it.

An outline of prospects. The best employees won’t be willing to remain doing the same things in perpetuity. They’ll want change in the form of new challenges and new opportunities. They’ll also want to know that they can move up the chain of command. Money isn’t the only motivator, but it’s one that almost everyone shares, and anyone who feels that their salary is likely to stagnate is only going to apply if they feel they have no other choices (suggesting a lack of marketable skills).

Set out what a high-achiever can hope to earn through their efforts in the advertised position. Don’t promise anything, certainly, but note that a successful candidate who performs exceptionally can expect commensurate financial compensation, increased working flexibility, and relevant promotions. If someone is being really selective about their applications because they can afford to be, give them reasons to view your company as a place to grow.

Flesh out your digital marketing job descriptions with these key features, and you’ll end up with a much stronger pool of candidates to consider. This will save you time when interviewing and deciding whom to pick, and ensure that the successful candidate is of a markedly higher proficiency and relevance than they would have been had you stuck with a more generic advertisement.

Patrick Foster

Patrick Foster
Patrick Foster is an ecommerce consultant at <a href="https://ecommercetips.org/"Ecommerce TIps.

Patrick Foster

Share This Post

Tweet

Recent Articles

Powered by staffingindustry.com ·