Rob Kelly

Some of you have asked Ongig:

“How engaged are job candidates with the next-gen job descriptions you’re building?”

One metric we look closely at is “average time on page.”

Below are the top 10 job descriptions based on time avg. spent per page (note: all are Ongiggitized jobs).We’ve included a few bullets on why these job descriptions might be more attractive than others.
 

1) Full Stack Engineer, H&L

  • Average Time Spent: 17:50
  • Location: SOMA, San Francisco, CA
  • # of people in video: 2
  • Video length: 3:13
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 2
  • Other highlights: Shawn Carolan, a well-connected Silicon Valley person, is in the video and it’s possible the super-high average time spent on this page was due to this being an early glimpse of an under-the-radar company. H&L also made a concerted effort to send a link for the job description to every candidate they came in contact with to “pre-qualify” them for the job. This likely prompted careful viewing by candidates.

 

2) Product Marketing Director, Rypple

  • Average Time Spent: 13:57
  • Location: SOMA, San Francisco, CA
  • # of people in video: 2
  • Video length: 2:34
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 3
  • Other highlights: Founder of Rypple Daniel Debow appears in the video and mentions he’s looking for people who are 1) creative, 2) have the ability to handle ambiguity & problems and 3) have a lot of horsepower. Rypple had been acquired by Salesforce.com earlier in 2012, and a job description featuring the founder drew tremendous interest.

 

3) Customer Operations Engineer for Cloudera

  • Average Time Spent: 10:22
  • Location: Palo Alto, CA
  • # of people in video: 3
  • Video length: 2:32
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 8
  • Other highlights: Support Manager Kathleen Ting mentions Cloudera’s theme of “Ask bigger questions;” Angus Klein, Senior Director of Support, compares their “level 1” support to level 3 support at other companies; and a first-hand account of the role is explained by Customer Operations Engineer Udai Kiran Potluri. The job description was strongly supported by Cloudera’s internal staff with high social sharing numbers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The intense interest comes from the leveraging of their social graph.

 

4) Sales Representative, Salesforce.com

  • Average Time Spent: 08:37
  • Location: Chicago, San Francisco & Toronto
  • # of people in video: 1
  • Video length: 3:00
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 32
  • Other highlights: VP Scott Keane appears and shares his experience when he had first interviewed with Salesforce.com. This highly engaged job description was promoted by Salesforce.com’s sales teams in a Twitter campaign, and also had the video embedded on their careers page in the first half of 2012. The embedded video engaged candidates who likely had a pre-qualifying interest in the position. Their interest kept them on the job description longer as they evaluated their potential fit for the job. The high number of comments & shout-outs also plays a role in engagement as their is more content for the candidate to consume.

 

5) Director of Acquisition, Strategic Partnerships, Hot Topic Media

  • Average Time Spent: 08:37
  • Location: Remote/Work from home
  • # of people in video: 2
  • Video length: 2:11
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 8
  • Other highlights: The two leaders of Hot Topic Media (Mary and Gady) seem to have a good rapport in the video (laughing at times).

 

6) Big Data Engineer, Klout

  • Average Time Spent: 08:29
  • Location: San Francisco, CA
  • # of people in video: 1
  • Video length: 3:20
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 6
  • Other highlights: Ding Zhou (Klout’s Chief Scientist) appears in the video and compares Klout to his former employer Facebook. This was another job description with strong social sharing. In particular, the job received over 100 Facebook likes in the first 48 hours of being launched. The combination of Ding Zhou being a former Facebook employee and the Facebook sharing gave this job description a strong boost.

 

7) User Experience Researcher, RealPage/Propertyware

  • Average Time Spent: 07:29
  • Location: San Francisco, CA
  • # of people in video: 1
  • Video length: 2:18
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 2
  • Other highlights: Product Head Christine Ho describes Propertyware as being “a startup within a larger public corporation (Real Page).”

 

8) Ruby Engineer/Evangelist, 10gen

  • Average Time Spent: 07:25
  • Location: Palo Alto, CA
  • # of people in video: 3
  • Video length: 2:46
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 6
  • Other highlights: Awesome video opener from programmer Kristina Chodorow: “Get paid to work on open-source software!” Engineering Manager Dan Pasette and Software Engineer Tyler Brock also join in the video.

 

9) Sales Associate, ReTargeter

  • Average Time Spent: 06:46
  • Location: San Francisco, CA
  • # of people in video: 2
  • Video length: 2:07
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”: 15
  • Other highlights: VP of Sales Vik Dugal kicks off the video with general needs, followed by an existing sales associate (Doug Heindel) explaining more details including a bit about why this job “is not for everybody) (always refreshing). This job description has a nice combination of social sharing and engagement in the comments & shout-outs. Those elements bring more candidates to the job, and provide more content to engage with.

 

10) VP of Global Internal Communications, Salesforce.com

  • Average Time Spent: 06:31
  • Location: SOMA, San Francisco
  • # of people in video: 1
  • Video length: 2:12
  • # of “Comments & Shout-Outs”:3
  • Other highlights: Senior VP, Global Employee Sucess Monika Fahlbusch discusses employee success (“what other companies call human resources”).

 
We’d love to know how much time candidates spend on other job descriptions if you have some data to share! For more tips on writing job descriptions, check out How to Write a Job Description — Best Practices & Examples.

by in Job Descriptions, Writing Job Descriptions