{"id":265,"date":"2017-11-21T16:53:25","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T06:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/?p=265"},"modified":"2022-03-11T18:35:58","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T08:35:58","slug":"anatomy-job-ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/2017\/11\/21\/anatomy-job-ad\/","title":{"rendered":"Anatomy of a Job Ad"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<h1 style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Wanted: Senior DBA!<\/h1>\n<ul style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Minimum 10 years experience managing SQL Server 2015 or newer<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p>It&#8217;s a classic joke &#8211; the job ad which wants you to have experience in a specific technology for longer than it&#8217;s existed. Sadly, it&#8217;s funny because there&#8217;s a grain of truth in it: job ads are terrible.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/files\/2017\/11\/pexels-photo-52608-Small.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-338 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/files\/2017\/11\/pexels-photo-52608-Small.jpeg\" alt=\"pexels-photo-52608 (Small)\" width=\"344\" height=\"230\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/files\/2017\/11\/pexels-photo-52608-Small.jpeg 718w, https:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/files\/2017\/11\/pexels-photo-52608-Small-300x200.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 344px) 100vw, 344px\" \/><\/a><em>Wanted: Junior Developer<\/em><\/p>\n<ul style=\"padding-left: 30px;\" type=\"disc\">\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>1-2 years experience writing software<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Strong knowledge of SQL, git, Python, Haskell, and Perl<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Good UI skills, excellent API design skills, knowledge of ESBs and other distributed software patterns<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Excellent grounding in the principles of good software design and Agile project delivery<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Experience with [you usually find a list of specific platforms and libraries here]<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Go-getter, always-be-learning attitude<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Highly regarded: strong maths and stats skills, C++ experience<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Highly regarded: exposure to data science, experience with Big Data platforms such as Hadoop<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Excellent communication skills are a must!<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I hate seeing job ads like this one. You want someone with 1-2 years&#8217; experience to know all of that &#8211; and be confident enough to tell a recruiter that, and back it up in an interview? You&#8217;re not selecting for capability here. You&#8217;re selecting for over-confidence, and the coincidence of having a first job which involved just the right mix of technologies.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Technology Leadership Position!<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Are you a dynamic leader with top-notch management skills and brilliant technical ability? Do you have world-class knowledge of big data platforms and machine learning? Are you just as comfortable writing a PhD dissertation as you are selling a group of executives on a new company strategy? Do you have a passion for creating a dynamic company culture and mentoring a team of brilliant engineers, all while maintaining an unwavering focus on creating an unmatched user experience? Do we have a job for you!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re posting a job ad like this one, you&#8217;d better have a remuneration package to match; but you probably don&#8217;t. The technology industry is full of people with imposter syndrome &#8211; and if the perfect applicant (who would have been great for your team) didn&#8217;t have it before they read this job ad, they will afterward. If the candidate who does meet that brief exists, they&#8217;re definitely not reading job ads on Seek, anyway.<\/p>\n<p>These are, of course, caricatures, but they&#8217;re not so different from real job ads I&#8217;ve seen. How about a real example from my own life?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Checkbox Syndrome<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Many years ago, I landed a job in the United States (I&#8217;m based in Australia, so this would have been a big move for me). The recruiter explained that the job had been open for nearly two years, and they were thrilled to have found me! I was their first suitable candidate, and they were keen to rush me through the hiring process.<\/p>\n<p>This puzzled me, because <em>I&#8217;m not that special<\/em>. How was I the first suitable candidate in two years?<\/p>\n<p>Well, it turns out that they&#8217;d written a very specific candidate description, and someone in HR had been handed the job of finding someone that matched. They were after someone who listed optimising high-throughput transactional systems on their LinkedIn profile, and who had completed at least two years of tertiary study in Latin or Ancient Greek.<\/p>\n<p>They were building some language-processing software, and someone had decided that an engineer with a background in linguistics would be good to have on the team. That was somehow translated to requiring some tertiary education in a classical language &#8211; and bam! Two years of turning down candidates who probably would have been highly successful in the role. All they actually wanted me to do was to come up with a way to load-test the system, and then find hot-spots in the code and optimise them.<\/p>\n<p>I never did end up moving to Houston: my visa application fell through (thanks, Global Financial Crisis). It was probably for the best: I wouldn&#8217;t have been a person to this company, or even an engineer; just a series of checkboxes.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What is a job ad for, anyway?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When you&#8217;re writing a job ad, please don&#8217;t forget what the ad is for. Your goal is to attract suitable applicants to apply, and discourage unsuitable applicants. Anything which doesn&#8217;t accomplish one of those two things is wasteful. Anything which discourages suitable applicants is a net loss.<\/p>\n<p>As a specific example of this, please leave &#8220;Good Communication Skills&#8221; out of your ad. You might think that poor communication skills will disqualify a candidate &#8211; but putting that in the ad isn&#8217;t going to stop unsuitable candidates from applying, and it&#8217;s not going to encourage suitable candidates to apply. It&#8217;s noise. Leave it out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sell the job &#8211; genuinely<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It all starts with empathy. Try to imagine yourself as your target engineer, tester, analyst, or whoever you&#8217;re trying to hire. Your goal is to sell them on the job, but also keep enough important criteria in there to discourage unsuitable applicants. The selling part is important: if there aren&#8217;t many great candidates out there, you need a job ad which will attract them. Candidates are about to invest a significant amount of their own, personal, outside-work time in applying for and interviewing at your company, and then you&#8217;re going to ask them to resign from their current position, where they have friends and valued colleagues and know the system, to join your team. Give them good reasons.<\/p>\n<p>Please don&#8217;t give them a sales pitch. Don&#8217;t spend most of the ad spruiking the company. Talking about how great you are is for your marketing material, or your annual shareholders&#8217; report.<\/p>\n<p>Just talk honestly about your culture, values, and benefits.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Anatomy of a Good job ad<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here it is. This is what your job ad should look like.<\/p>\n<ul type=\"disc\">\n<li>Talk about the role.<br \/>\nTell prospective candidates a little bit about the company and the role. This should be short. What does your company do? Who are you looking for? How will this position further the company&#8217;s mission?<\/li>\n<li>Say who you&#8217;re looking for.<br \/>\nReally cut it down. Don&#8217;t have 10 bullet points. Keep it to 3 or 4. Try to focus on higher-order skillsets, rather than specific technologies, unless that technology really is core to the role.<br \/>\nIf &#8220;Good Communication Skills&#8221; is making it to your short-list of 3 or 4 key skillsets, I hope you&#8217;re hiring a radio operator or air traffic controller. Otherwise, please, just leave it off.<\/li>\n<li>Tell them what&#8217;s in it for them.<br \/>\nDescribe your benefits. Tell them about the great company culture. Talk about training and conference budgets and career opportunities. Once again, keep it short and to the point.<br \/>\nIf you can&#8217;t think of anything to put here, you might have bigger problems.<\/li>\n<li>Tell them how to apply.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it. Really. No nice-to-haves &#8211; those just give suitable candidates a reason not to apply. Don&#8217;t do that. If you get two suitable candidates, and one of them happens to have one of your nice-to-haves, you might still offer the role to the other based on the bigger picture. If it&#8217;s not necessarily a differentiator even at the end of the recruitment process, it definitely has no place at the beginning.<\/p>\n<p><strong>But I want to list a bunch of stuff!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Resist the temptation. Are you hiring a team lead? Just say you&#8217;re hiring a team lead. Don&#8217;t list out all the stuff that team leads need to do.<\/p>\n<ul style=\"padding-left: 30px;\" type=\"disc\">\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Lead a team of software experts to deliver innovative products.<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Help to work with product owners to deliver real business value!<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Mentor senior engineers, and help them to mentor juniors.<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Engage with the business about technical challenges.<\/em><\/li>\n<li style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Foster a strong team culture.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Don&#8217;t do this! Team leads already know the day-to-day detail of the role, and they won&#8217;t be going back to the job ad to work out how to spend their time. Just say that you&#8217;re looking for an experienced team lead or a senior engineer looking to step up to a team lead role &#8211; and get on to covering the more important points! What kind of team is it? What is the team mission? Are you looking for someone to drive a major change, to keep an already-high-performing team pointed in the right direction, or to build a whole new team? That stuff is much more useful than saying things like &#8220;Ensuring the team is aligned with business priorities&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Where do I put things like &#8220;Strong work ethic&#8221; and &#8220;Ability to work in a collaborative team environment&#8221;?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the same place you put &#8220;Good Communication Skills&#8221;. People who don&#8217;t have a strong work ethic or the ability to work in teams are going to apply anyway, so all you&#8217;re doing is making the job ad longer and more boring.<\/p>\n<p><strong>This sounds like you&#8217;re a really cool person and I&#8217;d like to work with you.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/work-with-me\/\">TheTradeDesk is looking at hiring<\/a> a heap of software engineers in the next year!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Wait, was this secretly a job ad?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>No. This doesn&#8217;t match my &#8220;Anatomy of a Good job ad&#8221; at all! But recruitment is bigger than just job ads, and this was, secretly, a bit of guerrilla recruitment. That&#8217;s another idea I&#8217;m hoping you&#8217;ll take away from this post: recruitment is about a lot more than just writing a good job ad. It&#8217;s about being a place people will want to work, and making sure the right people know it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wanted: Senior DBA! Minimum 10 years experience managing SQL Server 2015 or newer It&#8217;s a classic joke &#8211; the job ad which wants you to have experience in a specific technology for longer than it&#8217;s existed. Sadly, it&#8217;s funny because there&#8217;s a grain of truth in it: job ads are terrible. Wanted: Junior Developer 1-2 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/2017\/11\/21\/anatomy-job-ad\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Anatomy of a Job Ad<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Anatomy of a Job Ad - Nerdhold Coder<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nerdhold.com\/coder\/2017\/11\/21\/anatomy-job-ad\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Anatomy of a Job Ad - Nerdhold Coder\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Wanted: Senior DBA! Minimum 10 years experience managing SQL Server 2015 or newer It&#8217;s a classic joke &#8211; the job ad which wants you to have experience in a specific technology for longer than it&#8217;s existed. Sadly, it&#8217;s funny because there&#8217;s a grain of truth in it: job ads are terrible. 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