“A job title is the cheapest form of compensation.” 
“My manager encouraged me to come up with a more creative job title.” 
“We just use what we’ve always had.” 
I’ve heard it all when it comes to picking a job title. 
In 2009, when a lot of the first creative job titles appeared, I took one of the jobs. Social Media Ninja. I swear I’m not making that up. My team made a lot of jokes about what my next role could be – Samurai? Warrior? Sensei? The title was fun, but it left a lot of essential things to the imagination. Things like what I did and what my next job should be, for example. 
See, back then, job titles were one of the first employer brand activation strategies. While companies were starting to understand how to tell their stories, they were under the impression that creative job titles would make their jobs “stand out.”

​Read more at Fistful of Talent.

Katrina trains teams and individuals to use what she calls ‘Power Moves’ - being bold, looking at your context, and saying ‘no’ to what conventional hiring methods say you should do. “Instead of playing email roulette, it’s calling the person. It’s sending a box of doughnuts because you saw them tweeting something nice, and saying, ‘Let’s talk.’”

Listen to Katrina Kibben share some more rule-breaking recruiting advice in this podcast by OfferZen.

You have about 14 seconds to grab a candidate’s attention with your job posts. But the uncomfortable truth is, many job posts are not worth a second glance.

“People are straight up guessing,” says Katrina Kibben, CEO and founder of Three Ears Media. “We have never been taught how to write job postings. Honestly, most of us have never been handed a decent example.”

Katrina’s company is dedicated to helping recruiters write better job posts. After spending years helping Fortune 100 firms shape their brand content, she decided that every company deserves the tools to tell their story in a way that connects with candidates in a more human way.

“There are few things we can control when it comes to hiring,” Katrina says. “But the one thing we can control is how we ask.”

Read more on the LinkedIn Talent Blog here. 

Get some quick advice on writing better job posts from Katrina Kibben on the New Yawk HR show. 

​Employees themselves can be an excellent source of recruitment-marketing content, says consultant Katrina Kibben.

“There’s a lot you could share from every department in your company that would be super-interesting to your hiring demographic,” she says. “You wouldn’t be giving away trade secrets, and you’d attract a whole lot of people.”

Candidates want to be “enchanted” with the idea of working on a particular team, says Kibben. This can be addressed via short questionnaires filled out by employees, such as “I’m excited to come to work every morning because of ‘fill-in-the-blank,’ ” she says.

“Videos, blog posts and social media posts that profile company leaders, or show what a day in the life at the company is like, can be used as a starting point to build engagement with your talent network,” says Michelle Armer, chief people officer at CareerBuilder.

Candidates are especially interested in information that’s useful, says Kibben. This can include emails offering helpful tips on preparing for an interview, she says.

​“Just go get a client.” Dawn Burke, innovative human resources professional turned consultant shares her journey from corporate life to consulting. She discusses how she didn’t initially self-identify as an entrepreneur, the need to do business bigger than herself, taking time to think and breathe, and the importance of admitting what you’re failing at.

Dawn Burke never thought HR would be her career. After tiring of the irregular schedule that comes with working in retail management, she decided to make a change – and eventually rose from administrative assistant to director of HR. After a decade at one company, she accepted a VP of people role at a tech organization in Birmingham, Ala.
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About 18 months ago, Dawn began her own consulting business, where she teaches people about modern HR practices and how to work in a more human way.