Turn Your JDs Into Landing Pages

Welcome to 📈🧠 Scale Smarter.

Today’s issue at a glance:

• Scaling Your Startup → Turn your JDs into landing pages to scale your candidate pipeline

• Scaling Yourself → 26 ways to use Text Expanders to get more time back (plus my personal top 3)

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🚀 Scaling Your Startup: Turn Your JDs Into Landing Pages

Need to scale your team? Make your job descriptions (JDs) work harder for you.

Don’t just copy a job description from a job ad online. Most companies are terrible at writing JDs that really draw candidates in and make them want to apply.

Instead, flip the script and treat your job posts and descriptions like a landing page with a goal of “converting” new applicants.

Here are the 6 key sections of the Landing Page Job Post, which is optimized to get candidates excited and convert them into applicants:

Let’s break it down 👇

1. Pitch Your Startup (Why You Should Apply)

Assume job-seekers don’t know who you are. They are searching for JOB TITLES, not your company. So the first thing to do once they click your job on LinkedIn or Indeed is to talk about your startup. 

And not the boring stuff: “Founded in 1946, Yawn Corp is a multinational conglomerate blah blah blah…” 😴Who cares??

You need to SELL yourself. Think of this like a landing page: You want them to read the first few lines and be so pumped about your company that they can’t wait to click “Apply.”

I love how Neon does this at the top of their job posts:

Consider adding:

• Your mission e.g. “We’re obsessed with…”

• Employees get equity ownership

• Investors and $ raised

• Company growth

• Awards you won

• Exciting benefits

• Big client logos

Use the top of the fold to build credibility. Don’t be shy.

2. What You’ll Own & Improve

If this employee only had to focus on 3 areas to be successful, what are they? These are the responsibilities they will own. 

Trainual does a great job of this with their job posts:

3. What You Already Know

What are the skills they absolutely must have before applying. Instead of listing nice-to-haves (e.g. MBA, 12yrs of XYZ experience), focus on what is truly needed to be successful. You might be turning away a great candidate!

Here’s the same example from Trainual:

4. How Success Is Measured

Be transparent and include specific success metrics. Think of the KPIs you’ll use for their performance review. Then there won’t be any surprises on how they will be held accountable if they get the job. 

5. Our Values

It’s important (especially in the early stages) that we find people who align with our values, so don’t keep them a secret. They can also be a huge selling point for the right job-seeker.

Take the values listed in your handbook or on your careers page and put them in the post so candidates see them (here’s an example from Mural):

6. CTA

What would a landing page be without a call to action? Ask them to apply! I also love adding a note of encouragement:

“P.S. If you don’t tick every box, please don’t rule yourself out just yet. We prioritize hiring incredible human beings over simply checking boxes – so if this role resonates with you, hit that apply button!”

Action: Go back to your live job postings and at least update the top section to SELL job-seekers on why it would be amazing to work at your startup.

💪 Scaling Yourself: 26 Ways To Use Text Expanders

At one point I did the math… At Uber in the early days, city teams responded to their own support tickets (we didn’t outsource this yet), and I answered over 10,000 support emails from drivers 😱 

I told myself I would never answer the same question twice. So when I wrote a very thoughtful answer to a common question, I’d save it so I’d never have to write it again.

And so began my love affair with text expanders—a tool that magically replaces a set of keystrokes with an expanded snippet of text. 

Let’s say I saved a conservative average of 2 minutes not having to type out the same answer for a support email. That means I saved myself 333 hours per year, or 2 FULL WEEKS. 

Here are 26 ways I personally use text expanders that you can steal and start using at your startup to get your time back (plus 3 of my favorites that I use all the time at the bottom):

Introductions

• Introduce two people (see 🥇My Favorite #1 below)

• Places and times I prefer for a coffee meetings 

• Confirm time and that a calendar invite is coming

• Request someone’s availability with Calendly info included (see 🥈My Favorite #2 below)

General Meetings

• Notes template to add meeting notes and action items

• Personal Zoom meeting room info for a quick call

• Message if someone is late to our Zoom call (see 🥉My Favorite #3 below)

Recruiting & Hiring

• Onsite interview instructions (address, parking, etc.)

• Link and instructions for the interview exercise 

• Polite rejection email if not moving forward

• Email response if an applicant appears to be overqualified (share salary range and see if they still want to move forward)

• Interview question list

• Link to the job posting

Marketing/Branding

• UTM snippets for tracking links for Google Analytics

• Hex codes for brand colors 

• Lorem ipsum text block

Sales

• Follow up messages to unresponsive leads

• Email template to send over agreement

• Email template to send over proposal

• Kick off call agenda for calendar invite 

• Bank details to accept deposits

• Request for testimonial

Customer Support

• Responses to FAQs

Odds & Ends

• Excel formulas and syntax (e.g. Index match match)

• Symbols that aren’t on the keyboard: →, ↓, ✓, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Slack emojis: 👍️ 👌

🥇My Favorite #1: Email Intros - With the work I do with startup founders, I’m finding myself making intros all the time. So I created a quick and easy template that helps me take all the guesswork out of connecting each side:

🥈My Favorite #2: Intro Response with Calendly - I am also setting meetings all the time, so I copied the same blurb to make setting up a call nice and easy for everyone:

🥉My Favorite #3: Late to Meeting - 3 minutes in and they’re still not on the Zoom we scheduled? I fire off this quick note (which assumes zero ill intent) to see if I can still salvage the meeting:

Pro Tip: Send this directly from the Google calendar invite (“Email guests”) and this note is now attached to the Zoom call-in info from the original invite, so the other party has the link for a quick click to hop right on. 

🎬 TL;DR—Your Actions For The Week:

• Scaling Your Startup: Open up your live job postings and update the top section to SELL job-seekers on why it would be amazing to work at your startup.

• Scaling Yourself: Download a text expander tool and start building snippets based on what you find yourself typing from scratch over and over. And steal my 3 favorites that I shared with you!

Whenever you're ready, there are more ways I can help you:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.

💰 Need more sales? This private 3-week B2B Sales Bootcamp will teach you the system startups like Neon used to 10X revenue YoY and grow to over $1M ARR without running any ads. I’m running 1-1 and small group sessions to maximize results, so space is limited—Join the waitlist.