A good starting point for your ’’first point of recruitment’’ (not the first point of contact, because that’s probably your landing page) is to create a clear value proposition for the inbound job candidates. Until your agency reaches a certain size, you can’t cater to everyone’s wishes concerning work-life balance. Your hiring decisions should always be based on a cultural fit more than a technical fit.
While technical skills are clearly important, it’s much easier to improve a skill than it is to change
a personality. If we want to go into specifics, we can go back to the user experience analogy. When writing a value proposition on the careers page, you need to think about what kind of agency you really are.
’’We are looking for dedicated people to help bring the most innovative web solutions to life for our clients by day, and help us put up new shelves for all these awards by night…’’
That statement will attract a certain kind of people:
- Fresh graduates with a lot of ambition looking for validation of their skills
- Experienced professionals who want an environment for their talents to be utilized
- People looking for a challenge and don’t even consider crunch time a negative word
- Career-building professionals who are looking for a place that gets them more awards to their resume
- People who live for their jobs and look forward to evenings and Saturdays at the office filled with pizza and fixing the kinks in the code
Then on the other side of the spectrum, you could have:
’’ You bring the talent, we bring the perks. At AUE Inc. (Agency Used as an Example), we value strategy and planning above everything else. And thanks to our in-depth research and planning, clients always get the solution they need, instead of the solution they think they want. This also means that our employees never have to worry about scope creep or staying at work past 5 PM. Oh, and did we mention possibilities of
working from home or the 4 day work week?”
A few sentences like this on your career page could go a long way towards attracting people that:
- Love their jobs, but don’t want to sacrifice time with their family for work
- Are perfect for the job, but would have had to relocate or travel multiple hours every day
- Are motivated for the job, but also have other ambitions and are trying to run some sort of side-hustle or project on the side
Sections like ”International Workplace” or ”Fun Squad” shows that we care about an open and fun work environment, where your colleagues also become your friends.