

A Review of 3 Hacker News Jobs Listings - giladvdn
http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2013/02/a-review-of-3-hacker-news-jobs-listings/

======
adrianhoward
(My standard rant on job adverts - not aimed at startups per se - but so much
of it seems to apply to startup ads too).

You're dealing with four groups of people:

1) Qualified: the people who have the skills you need and would want to work
for you

2) Unqualified: honest folk who either don't have the skills or don't want to
work for you

3) Deluded: people who think they can do the job despite the fact their
computing experience consists of knowing somebody whose cousin owns a
Playstation

4) Liars: people who know they can't do the job and will lie to get it anyway

So you want to:

* convince that first group that you have a wonderful job working for a competent company that's just right for them

* convince the others that they shouldn't waste everybody's time

Two big problems:

1) Almost by definition the Qualified are in work. Why wouldn't they be? So
you need to make sure that you're going to make something attractive enough
for people to consider jumping ship for.

2) It's a complete bugger to get rid of the Liars and the Deluded because...
well... they're liars and deluded :-)

The good news is that the Unqualified are happy to exclude themselves if
they're given enough info. They don't want to waste their own time applying to
stuff they they know they're not going to get.

So - how do you find somebody decent?

1) Best way is personal recommendation. Network away and see if anybody you
know and trust knows somebody who would be interested. Assuming you have
vaguely sane friends this is almost guaranteed to exclude the Deluded and the
Liars. Huzzah.

2) Second best way is to use a good recruiter. Unfortunately, in my experience
anyway, good agents are rarer than gold dust in the IT industry. Unless you
have a personal recommendation from somebody I'd steer clear.

3) The absolutely worst way to find somebody is a job advert - but sometimes
we have no choice ;-)

So - how do you know if you have a decent job advert?

You know the sort of person you're looking for. Pretend you're that person
sitting in a fairly comfortable job, with a reasonable salary, but feeling
slightly bored with your current work. Remember you know nothing at all about
your company and the work you do. Read your job advert. Do you want to apply?

If not you may want to consider my Patent Pending list of how not to write a
job advert :-)

1) Lie. Nothing attracts that ideal recruit more than showing up at the job
interview to discover that the salary is ten grand less than was advertised
and that they can't telecommute like the agent told them.

2) Bad spelling and grammar. Would you trust a company that cannot even check
the spelling on their job adverts?

3) Bad technical terms. The Qualified are not going to apply for a position as
a "PERL programmer with Central Gate Interface experience" :-)

4) No company info. Put your company name and URL on the advert. Good
candidates will want to google you and find out whether they want to work for
you. Let them. That way you'll let the Unqualified filter themselves out. Does
googling your company results in stuff that would make the brave run away
screaming? If so fix that first :-)

5) Bad job title. Treat the job title like the subject line of an e-mail. It
should be informative. It should be an abstract of the job. It should not be
"Programmer" or, even worse, "GREAT POSITION IN TOP COMPANY!!!". Something
like "Perl/mod_perl e-commerce developer". The Qualified are only skimming the
job ads to keep a weather eye on what's happening. Don't give them an excuse
to skip over the ad. Being specific also makes it harder for the deluded to
remain so.

6) No salary. At the very least quote a range. The Qualified are probably
working and need to know whether it's worth their while to jump ship. It's
also a good indicator of what kind of role it is. This will let the
Unqualified filter themselves out and reduce your pile of useless CVs.

7) Over general terms. Don't say "Perl programmer" say "Perl programmer. Must
have experience writing OO modules and unit/acceptance testing of web based
applications". Make it easy for the Unqualified to filter themselves out. Make
it harder for the Deluded to delude themselves. Not knowing the difference
between a job requirement and "it would be nice if...". Make the difference
obvious in your advert. Far too many ads are a shopping list of every possible
thing that might be vaguely useful. Are you really going to reject the perfect
candidate because they only have four rather than five years experience? Are
the Qualified going to spend the time figuring out what the job actually
involves? Nope - they have lives.

8) Hiding the job requirements. By the time they've got to the third paragraph
of market speak about how wonderful the company is the Qualified's eyes are
glazing over. Job requirements should be front and centre.

9) Not saying what the job is. For god's sake mention what they'll be
developing. It's one of the things that attract the Qualified. At the very
least mention the domain.

10) Not mentioning the work environment. If you have a small agile development
team using TDD then you don't want somebody who uses RUP in a group of forty,
or somebody who will only telecommute. So let them filter themselves out by
saying so.

11) No location. People want to know where they'll be working.

Remember - you want the best person for the job, not the most desperate. The
best people are going to be comfortable and happy to skip things. The
desperate are going to read everything.

So, get the attractive stuff that will capture the best up front where they'll
read it.

~~~
sytelus
Job Advert is not the worst way to find somebody. Depending on how you do it,
it's perhaps the best way to recruit someone. Good job adverts are intriguing
even to non job seekers, for example, a cleverly crafted puzzle or challanging
competition or just a pic of some office prank that demonstrates irrestiable
cultural aspect.

No HR professional would agree with you that quoting salary on job advert is
good idea. For most jobs typically wide range of experience and skills are
admittable. Even for very specific jobs 20% variance is very normal. Once you
quote a number you risk turning away who are already making bit higher or over
pay someone who is perfact candidate but getting significant less current pay.
Even quoting range is dangerous because unless you pay high end candidate
would always feel unsatiesfied. In addition, current employees can see this
number as well causing moral issues if they feel their title is more important
but getting less as well as loss of privacy for new hire. One situation when
you do want to quote number is when your offer is 2x or more than average
market rate and you will pay that regardless of their current pay and
employees don't care about privacy issues.

~~~
elemeno
From the jobseaker's perspective having a salary range listed, even if it's a
broad range like "various positions $40k-$100k", tells me whether it's worth
my time applying.

If the range of numbers doesn't cover what I want my target salary to be then
it's simply a waste of my time to spruce up my CV, write a cover letter and
get the process started. Chances are that I won't be in a position to ask what
the salary range is until I'm in an interview, but by that point I've already
invested a not insignificant amount of time into applying for the job -
especially since I've had to take time off work to come to the interview.

Frankly, I feel that any job advert that doesn't include solid indications of
what the company might be willing to pay is either a company that's arrogant
enough as to believe that my time is worthless, or it's a purely speculative
advert with no real job there. Either way, I'll be passing them over in favour
of companies with some more respect for their applicants.

------
eduardordm
inDinero is seeking for, what they call, Lead Software Engineer for months
now. I remember this because I would want to work there but they are seeking
more than one person.

What went through my head when I read the job ad.

"Are you self-motivated? Do you strive to be the best? Do you want to be an
integral part of our explosive growth?"

\- Yes, yes, but I don't like explosive things.

"you'll have to be super smart, well-versed in CS concepts and studies""

\- They are probably going to ask me to implement sorting algorithms on a
board, from their website their product seems simple, no need to back to my
old algorithms book, who knows.

"Both founders (Andy and Jessica) studied computer science before starting the
company, and they wrote most of the initial code until product launch."

\- Ok, I will be dealing with a lot technical debt.

"...you will communicate across our accounting and sales teams to discover
what will make our clients super happy and what will help us increase sales in
new verticals..."

\- I'm sorry, this is not what a lead engineer does. No serious engineer would
want to do that, I would be busy enough dealing with technical debt,
implementing new features and actually leading a team of engineers.

"Looking to the long-term, you will also need to upgrade Rails, make sure our
servers will scale, ensure high-security, and modularize key parts of the code
base. We know that even if you're leading a team you'll probably still want to
spend time coding, so this role also affords the time to do hands-on
programming."

\- See, you want more than one person. And you clearly don't really understand
the role of a lead engineer. You are asking for a CTO/Product
designer/Engineer.

This is why I didn't even consider applying.

~~~
pork
> "Both founders (Andy and Jessica) studied computer science before starting
> the company, and they wrote most of the initial code until product launch."
> > \- Ok, I will be dealing with a lot technical debt.

This made me laugh, because although the intention was well-meaning (you're
dealing with technical co-founders), an experienced programmer will instantly
realize that the probable case is what you pointed out.

I also agree that calling this position a "lead engineer" is horribly
misleading. My take is they want a combination of a DevOps person and a
Product Manager. Unless the product is trivial, this is seriously a terrible
gig -- jack of all trades, master of none.

~~~
stock_toaster
I almost sprayed coffee on my screen when I read that part about technical
debt, and instead managed to somehow laugh around the mouthful.

------
emperorcezar
The most annoying job posts (anywhere, not just on HN) to me are the ones that
fail to say what your company will do for me.

It is a very tight market for talent right now, at least tell me your
benefits. A job is a relationship, Tell me what you want me to bring to the
table, but also tell me what you're bringing to the table.

A job post that is just a list of requirements and nothing else rubs me the
wrong way.

One that I considered a good posting recently was
[http://www.authenticjobs.com/jobs/15424/problem-solving-
pyth...](http://www.authenticjobs.com/jobs/15424/problem-solving-python-
engineer)

------
niggler
Right now on the top page: " Multi talented developer wanted for YC company"

~~~
manys
And the ad itself is just as vague and meaningless as that title. I have to
think that these YC job ads are used as a viability signal to the YC partners
and that the company doesn't get help writing them.

------
DanielRibeiro
I wonder how Dan would review Square and Github's job listings:

<https://github.com/about/jobs>

<https://squareup.com/careers/engineering>

~~~
danshapiro
They're landing pages, not one liners, so different rules apply. But they're
not bad examples of the form. My favorite jobs landing page right now is
<http://jobs.amicushq.com/>.

~~~
javajosh
So good I filled it out. :)

------
tmarthal
And yet, the original author doesn't have any data to say how the various
headlines are doing. A nice writeup would be if someone at HN posted the CTRs
and applications (i.e. conversions) for the various job descriptions w/
headlines. Not sure if there would be enough data to make it statistically
meaningful, however.

In my limited analysis of a situation (which is just a summary of the above
comments?), you may get a higher CTR rate on the more general headlines but a
lower conversion rate. You may get a lower CTR on the more detailed headlines,
but a higher application conversion rate.

Deciding which headline is better most likely really depends on the underlying
content, and an author using their opinion on what constitues a good job
description may not always be correct.

------
nicholasjarnold
If you are dyslexic or just not awake yet, you may have noticed that the final
score (if inversed) is the closest whole number fractional approximation of π.

Edit: Maths

------
abcd_f
It'd be interesting to see how jobs listings from "Tell HN: Who's hiring"
threads perform. Both from employer and candidate perspectives.

Is anyone willing to share?

------
kamakazizuru
the most recent one is also undoubtedly the worst i´ve seen so far... the
title is shocking in it blandness and lack of creativity and the post itself
long and unexciting. Someone needs to review their job postings for them :

"Multi talented developer wanted for YC company"

~~~
rhizome
But make no mistake, they are "laser focused."

------
donnfelker
How the heck does this hit the front page when so much other good stuff is in
the "new" category. Baffling.

