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Published 12 days ago
Headquarters: Charlotte, NC
URL: http://JLSTradingCo.com/careers
- Does your soul express itself through videos?
- Is your hobby critiquing videos or films, figuring out ways to make them better?
- Do you thrive in a high-stress environment filled with political infighting, bureaucracy, and corporate nonsense?
If so, then we are the place for you, except you might hate how nice of a company we have - filled with happy, generally competent people that don’t put up with jerks. Frankly, it makes me sick how nice everyone is.
We are remote full time, have very flexible hours, people are judged by their output, not by how much they suck up to the boss, and turnover is super low because the company believes that happy employees=happy customers=happy bank account. Simply disgusting, if you ask me.
--Is this a real job ad?--
Yup! Amazingly enough, we actually paid money to post this on a bunch of different job sites. And it’s not even a pyramid scheme! Plus, get this: the owner just started paying our 60ish employees with money instead of Pizza Hut coupons - we’re big time, people.
Our careers page is actually worth checking out to learn more about how insane we are (sidenote: it won a web design award in 1993 - we’re a pretty big deal):
And check out our reviews on Google, Glassdoor, or Indeed to see that it’s not just the founder’s mother who says we’re cool.
--What do you guys do?--
We do a lot of different things these days including selling awesome consumer products (these are just a small sampling):
- Bad Parking Cards (https://amz.run/5Eya)
- Beverage Barricades (https://amz.run/6kip)
- Child Chucker (https://amz.run/9EUz)
Running this Amazon Pay-Per-Click agency: PPCFarm.com (we’re really, really good at PPC)
And we will soon be launching a SaaS product for inventory management.
We are doing our best to grow rapidly every year, and it’s our intention to continue that for as long as possible, which means we need good people to help us keep up with the growth.
--What is your company like?--
1. You Can Be Yourself. You don’t have to put on a fake, professional face. You can just be yourself. You can talk smack to the CEO (highly encouraged), and no one will think anything of it. You don't have to dress up, or use formal language, or pretend to be something you're not - you can just be you.
2. Major Opportunities for Career Growth. We are not trying to just be a small business. We plan to be doing $100 million annually in the next few years. We promote quickly once we identify talent. It doesn’t matter what your credentials are – it matters what you get done.
3. Full Time Remote/Flexible Hours. You will be working from home in your pajamas, on your schedule. And we don’t care if you work 10 hour days 4 days a week or 6 hours a day and catch up over the weekend. So long as you get a lot of work done, we’re happy campers.
4. Complete Work/Life Balance. If you’re routinely working more than 45ish hours, you’re gonna get a friendly talking-to. We want you to be operating at 100% capacity, which means that you need to rest.
5. Strongly Anti-BS. Anybody in the company can (and is expected to) tell the CEO when he is wrong. There are no bureaucratic or BS rules getting in the way of getting work done.
6. No Micro-Management. Once you’re trained and have demonstrated you know your stuff, we are pretty hands-off. In fact, if you need external management to stay on-task and motivated, we probably aren’t the place for you.
7. No Toxic/Incompetent People Allowed. We try very hard to screen out mean or stupid people before they get in, but in case they slip through, we fire them quickly. You will never have to interract with someone who is an obvious idiot or straight up malicious. No toxic or incompetent people at work? Could it really be? [Yes]
8. Supportive Environment. We don’t operate via intense stress or unreasonable top-down deadlines. Everyone wants you to be successful – internal politics are at a minimum here.
9. Lots of Raises. We do our absolute best to get ahead of things and give raises preemptively, so you don't have to ask for one. It's not unusual at all for someone to receive 2+ raises per year.
10. We’ll Invest in Your Training. We want you and everyone to get better constantly. You’ll be learning new things all the time, and are strongly encouraged to invest time every day to learn new things, improve your system/work process, and just generally try to make your life easier.
11. 4-6+ Weeks Vacation. We 100% want you to recharge, so having plenty of time off is absolutely worth it.
12. Paid Maternity/Paternity Leave. We’ve even started letting people skip meetings during labor!
13. Self-Funded So We Can Do What’s Right for Us. We don’t have to answer to anyone but ourselves, so we can make the right decision for the long-term health of the company vs trying to get big too fast or cut corners to appease some selfish investor.
--What are your company’s values?--
See here: http://www.jlstradingco.com/careers/
Yes, those are legitimately our values. The careers page is definitely worth checking out - it’s not just normal corporate BS. We promise you’ll learn a lot about us.
--OK, so I’ve read like 8 dang pages about you guys. Will you tell me what the actual job is?--
No.
--Wait... What?--
OK fine.Here’s the deal:
We need to produce a lot of videos and have it be an in-house capability. We have lots of ambitions here, but aren’t certain on the right way to accomplish them. This is definitely gonna be a fuzzy, feel-our-way-through kinda dealio. We need your help to do this.
What kind of videos? More or less all kinds. We need:
- Product videos (to put on Amazon listings for example)
- Ads that we can promote online
- Organic social media videos
- Training videos for internal use
Wow! Only those things? Should I also need to cure cancer? Why not throw in solving Middle East politics while we’re at it!
That is fair. I promise that we are not actually expecting you to be a genius at all of these things. You just need to be comfortable working on each individual step of the video production process (with guidance from others) to make finished videos, even if you’re not the best in the world at each individual step.
As long as you’re willing to wear lots of different hats, learn like crazy, and constantly adapt/improve, then you’ll be in good shape. You’re a generalist at the start, then as we grow, you can delegate some of the hats to others.
Like everyone else in the company, you will also need to innovate regularly - which means figuring out ways to improve quality and production speed.
It is challenging, but fun work that’s going to require a lot of time and task management, problem-solving, and a reasonable amount of people skills.
--Do I need experience?--
This role is probably not for someone who has never made videos before though you don’t need to have X years of experience or anything like that. We just want to see that you are generally capable, enjoy making videos, and are basically good at it.
This is also not a job just for noobies - if you’re experienced but still believe that you have lots to learn, then this will also be a fit for you.
--Do I need a college degree?--
You just need to be awesome.
--What are your inspirations?--
If we could (eventually) be in the ballpark of Harmon Brothers or Vat19 in their heyday, we’d be very happy campers (remember Rome wasn’t built in a day - we’re not gonna get there overnight, but this is the long-term ambition).
--Are there any geographic restrictions?--
As long as you are in a country that doesn’t have active sanctions from the US government, we are interested. Our founder isn’t known for respecting the government much, but they have all the guns, so…
--Am I doing all the roles in video production?--
You’ll definitely be a generalist to start. You’ll be working closely with our founder and also the head of creative who will absolutely help on the creative ideation/script writing side. You’ll be responsible for the physical production and editing (at the start at least - we definitely intend to grow the team once you’re successful).
--Do I have to provide all the equipment?--
Once you’re hired, we will buy the equipment/software that you need within reason. We are pretty scrappy and will expect you to be as well, but that doesn’t mean you should just be filming/editing on a 5-year-old iPhone. We want you to know we mean business so we'll get you a 5-year-old iPhone Pro.
--Do you have a studio?--
We have a warehouse in Charlotte, NC but this job is not required to be local to Charlotte. I think we’re gonna have to improvise a lot, but we anticipate it being the case that you’re gonna have to set up a make-shift studio near you.
--This sounds pretty good, though I’m still skeptical that this isn’t a pyramid scheme.--
You sound just like the tax authorities!
--That doesn’t resolve any of my fears, but what do I need to do to apply?--
Please submit your information on the following page to apply. We promise to respond within 5-10 business days even if our answer is No.
There will be multiple steps in this process, FYI, including a long written application, interviews with potentially a few different people, and paid work test(s). Hiring the right people is really hard and very expensive if we do it poorly, so we have to front-load the process. I'm sorry about that and thank you for sticking with us.
Once you’re in our pipeline though, I would anticipate giving you a final answer within a few weeks, depending on how it goes. We definitely don’t want to string you along, and as long as you do what we ask, we promise to tell you “yes” or “no”, and to not just ghost you (like everybody I match with on Tinder).
Thank you for your time and interest, and I hope we can work together soon!
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