- Are you tired of not being able to express yourself through the medium of d*ck jokes?
- Do you like creating something from nothing, especially if it’ll make someone laugh?
- 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):
http://www.jlstradingco.com/careers/
--What do you guys do?--
We sell a lot of different things but our primary focus now is developing/engineering from scratch very cool products in a variety of niches.
A small sampling:
- Bad Parking Cards: (http://amzn.com/dp/B01HLGZRCQ)
- Shart Survival Kit: (http://amzn.com/dp/B09VTJRGBJ)
- Dehydrated Water: (http://amzn.com/dp/B072L38SGT)
Our business is growing 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. 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 want to catch up on the weekend. So long as you get a lot of work done, we’re happy campers.
2. 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.
3. 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, and no one will think anything of it.
4. 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.
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. 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.
8. No Toxic People Allowed. We try very hard to screen out mean people before they get in, but in case they slip through, we fire them quickly. Imagine never having to interact with toxic people at work - how nice would that be?
9. 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.
10. Four+ Weeks Vacation. We 100% want you to recharge, so having plenty of time off is absolutely worth it.
11. 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.
--So, what will I actually be doing?--
Super short version:
Getting paid to learn a bunch of skills in and around product development then making a ton of hilarious gag gifts that will delight our customers without getting us put onto any (more) watch lists.
Here is a bulleted list of responsibilities:
- Develop a concept for a funny gag gift or prank
- Do market research to get an idea of its potential
- Rough out the concept/design/jokes
- Write jokes for the packaging
- Communicate with a graphic designer to finalize the product
- Work with our sourcing team to find a vendor for actually making it
- Manage all the details of getting the product made and into our warehouse (there are A LOT of details)
- Provide jokes for the marketing materials
Things like that. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to come in and do all these on day 1. You’ll be trained and coached so you can learn this stuff from the ground up.
It’s fun work, but it’s not all just jokes - you have to produce, and find ways to automate/delegate so that you can get more efficient. We want to eventually launch hundreds of gag gifts per year, and you’re gonna be one of the key people responsible for making that happen.
--Do I need experience with product development?--
Not at all. We want special people, and don’t give AF what their background is. Most of our best people did nothing remotely related to their current roles. We hire much more for potential than existing knowledge.
We’ll train you how to do all these things. Though, we probably can’t train you to be funny unfortunately.
--Do I need a college degree?--
You just need to be awesome.
--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…
--What are some example products you want to have made?--
We’ll definitely help you with concepts, and you’ll eventually be doing things that you came up with, but to give you some examples, here are some more things we recently developed:
- Extra small condoms (a box filled with rubber thimbles with a bunch of jokes on the packaging)
- The Child Chucker
- The Human Cone
--Does everything have to be a d*ck joke?--
First, you sound like my ex on our wedding day. Second, definitely not. We have a long list of d*ck-free ideas, and I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with plenty of other things.
--How funny do I have to be?--
This is kinda tough. Probably no one in the company is capable of being a stand up comedian, but we can probably riff pretty well and recognize funny when we see it. The ability to write funny things vs being funny in conversation are correlated but not 100%. If you aren’t necessarily the funniest person in the room, but you think you can meme with the best of them, then this might still be the gig for you.
You’re basically gonna be a comedy writer and a project manager. If you don’t foresee yourself being comfortable writing a lot of jokes regularly, this probably isn’t the gig for you.
--This sounds pretty good, though I’m still skeptical that this isn’t a pyramid scheme.--
You sound just like our tax auditor!
--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!
almost 3 years ago
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