You know what they say, “the best resources in life are free”!
Okay, fine, that’s not exactly how it goes but aside from the candidates themselves, our sample job description templates are our employers’ favourite resources, and we’re guessing that’s because it can be painstakingly difficult and time consuming to create them.
Job description templates have the highest adoption rate and limiting these resources to only our customers didn’t seem like the right thing to do.
Here’s why:
This is the typical journey I go through when looking for a resource:
- Search “social media calendar template” and click the first few links
- Run into a poorly designed HubSpot landing page where I can’t really figure out if what I’m looking at is what I’m looking for
- Need to fill out an absurdly long form to get to the content
- Feel frustrated, exit the window and feel a little sad about my decisions in life
Now here’s a journey I’d like to go through looking for the same thing:
- Search “social media calendar template” and click the first few links
- Get the content I want right on the page or a one-click download button
- Feel like I got moves like Jagger
Unless you hate Jagger and really enjoy being sad, I think we can both agree the latter is better.
Gated content sucks
Filling out forms to get to content is an awful experience and everyone seems to know it.
It’s a product of what marketing has become – seeing people as leads, rather than humans. Dave Gerhardt from Drift, a company who has decided to put a stop to gated content, expressed it best:
“We’ve lost the importance of a great story and truly connecting with people. We live in this world where it’s all about content, content and more content. And SEO. And ranking for this keyword and that keyword. And algorithms and conversion rate optimization. Pieces of that stuff are still important to marketing, but overall, I think we’ve lost our way. Marketing today has become more about gaming the system and get rich quick schemes.”
And we’ve been guilty of this as well, making employers create an account to access our job description templates never made any sense.
Providing value to the ecosystem, not just our customers
Gating our content doesn’t align with our mission to help employers find the best young talent in the region and help students & grads get their careers started. This involves:
- Helping all employers post relevant jobs to the youth, not just our members
- Showing employers how they can better attract the talent they’re looking for
- Making sure candidates see job descriptions more accessible to them
Once you’ve decided to hire students and fresh graduates, we want to make sure the rest of the process is as easy and trouble free as possible. From setting up an attractive program, deciding how much you should pay them, advertising the position, to hiring the best candidates, we want to help.
All of the content we create and share from here on out will be free.
No more sign up forms, no more barriers, just value.
In fact, let’s jump in with one of the first things you need to do when looking for an intern.
Let’s write an attractive job description.
Job description templates for internships and entry-level roles
We’ve designed simple templates for a range of roles within an organisation that our employers find incredibly valuable:
(Click the icons above to access the templates)
This will help you draft a job description that’s suited to students and fresh young graduates (clean, simple and to the point), so that you can better attract the talent you’re looking for.
The templates cover all basic information necessary for a job post: job title, company description, about the role, key responsibilities, what the candidate will gain and qualifications needed.
However, there’s a lot more to creating engaging job descriptions than downloading templates (but it’s a pretty good place to start).
Does your tone match who you’re looking for?
Just like we advise our students and grads to add their personality to their CVs, if you want to attract the right interns for your position, it doesn’t hurt to “spice up” your job description beyond our suggestions.
The tone of your job description can greatly influence the type of candidate you get. For example, using the job title:
vs.
The use of Rockstar and Traineeship, rather than intern, implies a workplace with a great deal of creativity and startup spirit with the chance for full time employment.
That’s not to say that simply stating “Marketing Intern” is wrong. If you’re looking for more formal minded interns for a more corporate environment, then using the term “Rockstar” might not be message you want to send across, likewise, you shouldn’t use the word traineeship if you can’t offer more than a few weeks of work.
At the end of the day, the tone of your description should fit your company culture, brand and environment and give potential applicants a clue at the type of people they might be working with.
Avoid business jargon
This piece of advice is applicable to all job descriptions and writing in general. Your internship may be one of the candidate’s first few experiences in their chosen career and might not be completely aware of all the facets in your field.
Describing your company as:
“…An international oilfield services provider of behind-casing logging solutions in the areas of Reservoir Flow Characterization, Well Integrity and Hydrodynamic Optimization and Production Enhancement.”
Might make sense as concepts, but not all it’s applications as products.
However, saying you’re an:
“A fully integrated, global petroleum and chemicals enterprise and a world leader in exploration, production, refining, and distribution.”
Makes sense to most people, regardless of their knowledge of your industry.
Get specific
Don’t be vague about what you’re looking for, for example, terms like “computer literate” or “good communications skills.” These terms are void of much meaning and incredibly relative.
This piece of advice can also be extended to avoiding buzzwords like “dynamic”, “creative” or “hardworking”, which can mean many things to many people. In general, get specific as possible.
Instead of this:
Go with this:
Expect more from Oliv, weekly
We’re going to putting a lot more focus into our content and resources for businesses to make it easier for you to grow. It will be totally free and you don’t have to be an Oliv customer (though if you’d like to try the platform, you can sign up here).
We’ll be releasing a new post each week, you can sign up on the mailing list below if you’d like to be notified as soon as it’s published.
See you next week. If you have something you want to learn more about when it comes to students and graduate recruitment, let me know in the comments below or hit us up on Instagram.
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