The first draft of this advert said "Social Media Manager" and mentioned a content calendar. We deleted it. This is who we’re actually looking for, which will appeal to far fewer people, one of whom we'd like to hire.
The short version
We make sandwiches, subs and wraps in Halifax and van them out before dawn to convenience retailers, colleges, universities, and hospitals across the country.
We have 45 followers on Instagram and 103 on TikTok. We suspect a fair number are relatives.
We'd like to become the most talked-about brand in food-to-go in this country. Not well regarded in the trade press, which is a lower bar than it sounds and mostly involves a lanyard: talked about. The ambition is that marketers in cities that have never given food-to-go a moment's thought start sending each other our content.
Why you have a blank canvas
Nothing has been established here. No playbook requiring protection, no audience awaiting incremental optimisation, no fifteen years of brand social to unpick. Whoever takes this decides what Northern Bites becomes online, largely unsupervised.
Lunch, meanwhile, is the best-attended recurring event in Britain - tens of millions of people, same twenty minutes, every weekday - and no brand has ever done anything interesting with it. The category's creative output to date consists of photographs of sandwiches, lit from above, on slate.
What we're actually hiring for
Most social planning meetings ask some version of how do we promote this? We'd like the person we hire to be completely uninterested in answering that question.
The question here is closer to: what could we make that someone would send to their mate at half eleven at night, unprompted?
We don't want thirty posts about a sandwich. We'd be considerably more interested in someone who wanted to invent three characters, give them irreconcilable personalities and a long-running dispute about something trivial, and have people coming back on Thursday to see how it was going.You wouldn't be hired to represent Northern Bites on social media.
You'd be hired to build something on social media that Northern Bites happens to own.
Actually, a good proportion of what you make need not feature a sandwich at all. Nobody is going to ask why the product isn't on screen by the third second. There is no one in this building whose job that is.
What you'd do
- Decide what Northern Bites should be famous for on social, then go and make that true
- Invent recurring formats: write them, shoot them, cut them, publish them
- Build characters, running jokes and the accumulated nonsense that people who study this insist on calling lore.
- Have something out by Tuesday afternoon when the internet does something on Tuesday morning, having consulted nobody
- Read every comment, then build the next episode partly out of what's in there
- Bring in creators and on-screen talent when an idea needs them
- Retire formats the moment they stop being engaging, including the one you're most attached to
No content team, no agency and an approval process consisting of one person whose contribution is usually "go on then". What makes someone right for it
- You think in series, not posts.
- A working theory of why things get shared
- Getting something out of nothing: a chiller room at 4am, a driver with firm views on Halifax's one-way system, a delivery that went wrong in a way that was, on reflection, quite funny.
- Making people feel included rather than sold to. Hard, largely unteachable, and essentially the whole job.
- Patience. You'd be building an audience for a good while before anyone asks it to buy anything, and we won't be asking for some time.
The practical bit
- Hours: 16–24 a week, arranged mostly as you like, a decent number if not all of them in Halifax.
- Craft: you can shoot and edit on a phone or laptop and write something with a rhythm to it.
- Your CV matters less than the industry pretends. Comedy, telly, screenwriting, soaps, journalism, improv, YouTube, TikTok, theatre, producing, a fan account that got out of hand, all of it counts, some of it for a great deal more than five years of managing brand accounts. If you're 17 with extraordinary instincts and an inner voice telling you you're underqualified, ignore it, we'll be the judge.
Don't apply if:
- Your first question is how many posts a week
- Your instinct on day one would be a content calendar and a tone-of-voice document
- You'd want formal brand guidelines (we haven't got any and weren't planning to commission some)
- You'd want everything signed off before it went out
- Polished is your default setting rather than an occasional deliberate choice
- Making something with no product in it at all would make you uneasy
How to apply
You can submit a CV if you like, but we’d rather you did the following:
Imagine you started on Monday and nobody's going to tell you no, which is less a hypothetical than a description. Pitch us one idea: a format, a character, a world, a recurring thing of any description, that would make somebody follow a food-to-go manufacturer on a day they've no intention of buying a sandwich.
Consider:
- What episode one is
- Roughly what episode eight looks like
- Why anybody comes back for episode nine
- The part that makes you slightly nervous, the bit you'd normally leave out to seem sensible. In our experience, that's where the idea is hiding.
Any format. A page of writing, a voice note of two minutes, something filmed on the way to the shop, four bullets and a bad drawing. We're not assessing presentation here.
Keep it under an hour. Nobody should do a day of unpaid work to demonstrate that they can think. Send it to [email protected]. That’s it.
To summarise:
A sandwich company in West Yorkshire with 148 followers would like to be watched on purpose by people who aren't hungry, has limited idea how that's done, and intends to hand the whole problem to one person and get out of the way.
Benefits:
- Discounted or free food
- On-site parking
Application question(s):
- Do you have examples of social accounts you have managed? They don't have to be for businesses.
Work Location: In person
