Yorkshire council posts job advert looking for 'digital ninja'

Now you can courtesy of Kirklees Council, which is growing its communications team.

The authority is advertising for two new senior roles: a specialist in digital communications and an experienced graphic designer.

It’s the digital communications job description that stands out.

As well as possessing “an engaging tone of voice” the successful applicant should be “a digital ninja not afraid to try new things”.

The advert concludes with: “In return we can offer a place where no two days are the same, a potential audience of almost half a million residents and a breadth of subject matter you’ll struggle to find anywhere else.”

Kirklees spends £785,000 annually on its communications team, a sum it says is “is in line with other authorities of a similar size”.

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Currently, it employs 22 staff: 12 full-time permanent, four part-time permanent, and six full-time temporary.

The two new roles, each advertised with a salary of £30,507 – £32,878, will take the council’s spend to more than £800,000 a year.

In 2018 the council created a new £65,000 Head of Strategic Communications role to support its future ambitions and its “transformation journey”.

That journey was at the heart of a peer review carried out last summer by experts with the Local Government Association.

Their 14-page report made a series of recommendations to the council, which included crafting and telling its “very good story” successfully, and to put strategic communications “at the heart of the organisation”.

A Kirklees Council spokesman said: “Communications is a key part of the work we do and has to be factored in as part of any service, project or scheme we deliver.

“It’s really important that local people and organisations are kept up-to-date with important announcements and any decisions made by the council, as well as enabling them to feedback, comment and engage with us directly.

“Our recent peer review further highlighted the importance of this. With the number of communications channels constantly growing and evolving, the skill set needed within the council has to follow suit.

“Our more traditional forms of communicating such as through the press still remain, however.

“On average our team responds to more than 30 press queries every week, often with very short time-scales and this takes up a lot of time and resource.”