Shopify’s Toronto Job Openings (PR Manager and Social Media Manager) and Some Insider’s Hints on How to Land Those Jobs

This company:

• They make the ecommerce platform that makes it easy for anybody to open and run an online shop.
• In the past 7 years, over 60,000 online shops have been created with Shopify, moving over 13 million orders and accounting for over 2 billion dollars in sales.
• Here are a few big names with Shopify-powered shops: Amnesty International, Austin City Limits, Beck, Bon Jovi, CBGB, the CHIVERY, Epic Meal Time, Evernote, 50 Cent, Foo Fighters, GitHub, Hooters, LMFAO, Lollapalooza, Penny Arcade, Tesla Motors, Tori Amos, and xkcd.
• Profit magazine called Shopify the smartest company in Canada, Fast Company named them one of the world’s top 50 most innovative companies, and here’s how ThinkEcommerce ranks them against their competition:

They’re looking for a couple of good people to fill a couple of job positions:

in this city:

Here’s one of the positions…

There are more details about the PR Manager position on Shopify’s “jobs” site, but here’s the general gist:

• The ideal candidate is probably doing one of the following in his/her current job:
  • Managing PR, communications, or media at a tech company.
  • Working at a PR firm, primarliy with tech clients.
  • Journalism, with a fair bit of media outreach.
• To do well in this job, you have to have a solid understanding of, and at least a few contacts in, tech and business media. This job is about putting Shopify’s best foot forward on TV (think tech business news segments on cable news), national newspapers with a tech business bent (think New York Times and the Wall Street Journal), national magazines with a focus on tech, business, and entrepreneurship (think Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Inc.), and tech-meets-business sites (think Mashable, TechCrunch, The Next Web).
• Whoever gets this job will effectively be a one-person PR firm, doing all sorts of things from planning global PR campaigns to doing media relations to creating supporting promotional materials to working with the product team to measuring the impact of various PR initiatives.

…and here’s the other one:

There are more details about the Social Media Manager position on Shopify’s “jobs” site, but I can sum it up for you:

• The ideal candidate should have:
  • A solid grasp of how social media works, and how it can be used to get more people open Shopify shops, make Shopify shopowners happy, and boost Shopify’s online reputation.
  • A presence on the “usual suspects” of social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter at the very least, with Google+ and Pinterest as nice-to-haves. It’ll help if you have a decent Klout score, say like mine.
  • Enough graphic arts skill to create images to be used in social media campaigns.
• The major goals of this position is to make more Shopify users, and to keep the existing Shopify users happy — all through social media. Doing this will also require measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.
• Whoever gets this job will effectively be a one-person social media machine, doing all sorts of things from planning global social media campaigns to maintaining Shopify’s presence on various social media platforms to actively monitoring social media channels for mentions of Shopify and responding when necessary, and building trust.

At Shopify, they equip everyone with a nice set of really cool gear to get their work done:

The picture above shows the gear that was waiting for me at my desk on my first day at the job. I’m sure they’ve updated what comes as “Shopify standard issue”, and I’m sure it’s fantastic.

…and you get to work in a fun, stimulating environment instead of a joyless, soul-killing, joyless cubicle farm…

These are all photos of the mothership in Ottawa, but they’ve gone to great lengths to make the Toronto office a great place to work as well. Much of the credit goes to Chief Culture Officer Daniel Weinand, whose job is to keep Shopify feeling like a fun place, even as it grows from scrappy startup into established middle-sized company.

Better still, you’ll be working in an industry that’s only getting started, and growing like gangbusters!

Ecommerce used to be a nichey “early adopter” sort of thing, but not anymore! It’s harder and harder to find someone who hasn’t ordered something online, and with ecommerce growing at twice the rate of regular bricks-and-mortar retail and still less than 10% of all retail (that’s still something on the order of $50 billion every quarter).

Does this sound like the kind of place where you’d like to work?

So how can you get yourself one of these jobs?

You’re going to have to do more than just fill out the application form and submit a resume. Having a resume puts you in the not-so-elite group known as “everybody”:

Shopify sets itself apart, and you’re going to have to do the same:

One successful applicant created a Shopify shop as his application, “selling” himself and also proving that he understood the product:

Hint, hint: If you’re applying for the PR Manager position, perhaps you should put together a press kit about yourself. If you’re applying for the Social Media Manager position, perhaps you might want to start a social media campaign to explain why you’re the best candidate. You might want to make use of this hashtag:

Do you know who Shopify’s competition are? You might want to look that up.

Hint, hint: There’s a graphic near the beginning of the article that might help!

“Draw the fucking owl” is a mantra at Shopify. If you’re applying to work there, make sure you’ve internalized the comic below, and be ready to explain how you’d draw the owl if you landed the job:

Make sure you touch base with Mark Hayes, marketing and PR guy at Shopify, and tell him Joey sent you.

He’s mark.hayes@shopify.com and @allsop8184 on Twitter. Try and strike a balance between being creative in how reach out to him and not wasting his time!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.