
Technical job post tips for the desperate - nathanh
http://blog.hirelite.com/technical-job-post-tips-for-the-desperate
======
Silhouette
So basically, recognise that you are employing human beings rather than
machines, and treat potential candidates with respect rather than going for
obviously one-sided positions that good candidates are going to see right
through? It's a little sad that this isn't just common sense, isn't it?

What I don't understand is how nearly universal bad employment conditions seem
to be. I can understand businesses wanting to maximise the benefit from
investing in hiring staff. However, all the evidence I have ever seen shows
that sustaining long hours is counter-productive, supporting a good work-life
balance keeps happier and ultimately more effective staff, etc. The big
improvements in productivity I've seen have all been at companies that have
dramatically _improved_ their staff's working conditions, for example by
experimenting with shorter working weeks, complete flexi-time, allowing off-
site working by default, etc.

How is it that even large companies with dedicated HR departments, training
for managers, etc. still seem to push in the opposite direction? I suppose
good working conditions, particularly those based on flexibility, are always
open to abuse, but surely staff who are going to take advantage regardless
will just find other ways to do so if you judge them by bum-on-seat metrics.
Meanwhile, I wonder how many people take advantage of employers in some way
mainly because they consider the deal to be abusively one-sided otherwise, and
how many good people never get hired in the first place because they wouldn't
work under those conditions...

~~~
stonemetal
_dramatically improved their staff's working conditions, for example by
experimenting with shorter working weeks, complete flexi-time, allowing off-
site working by default, etc._

I believe it is a case of known cost, hidden benefit. Basically each of those
items has a fairly easy to measure cost(shorter work weeks for salaried
individuals basically means you are paying more for less.) Where as
improvements in productivity are not so easily measured before implementing
them.

~~~
Silhouette
> I believe it is a case of known cost, hidden benefit.

Sure, that much I understand. What I can't figure out is why such ignorant and
short-sighted policies are still tolerated, given that they directly impact
the effectiveness, the reputation, and ultimately the bottom line of each
business that adopts them.

It's not as if the empirical data is particularly hard to find, or as if there
aren't small businesses (and probably the occasional larger one, but it's
rare) benefitting from more enlightened relations between employer and
employees. So what are we missing? What overriding factor drives larger
companies, for all their more formalised policies and training investments, to
such poor people management?

~~~
anamax
> What I can't figure out is why such ignorant and short-sighted policies are
> still tolerated, given that they directly impact the effectiveness, the
> reputation, and ultimately the bottom line of each business that adopts
> them.

Where are the numbers?

> It's not as if the empirical data is particularly hard to find,

google "programmer productivity working conditions" doesn't find anything
quantitative on the first two pages.

~~~
Silhouette
Try looking for more general terms using Google Scholar.

For example, here's a UK government report from the mid-2000s, featuring
several relevant industrial case studies:

<http://www.bis.gov.uk/files/file14239.pdf>

------
snorkel
Ooh can I play too?!

* Don't require 10 years experience with a language or technology that less than 10 years old * Don't list hundreds of unrelated skills required because you're hoping this position will do the work of 5 employees and 2 consultants. * Don't mention "self-motivator". Who would describe themselves otherwise? * Don't call the position a "Director of" when it has no direct reports, no hiring budget, and itself reports to an intern in marketing. * Don't ask how many ping pong balls would fit in a school bus unless your business is directly related to filling buses with ping pong balls.

~~~
shasta
> Don't ask how many ping pong balls would fit in a school bus unless your
> business is directly related to filling buses with ping pong balls.

In job postings? Do you have the following in mind?

    
    
        Send applications to X@ballbussers.com where X 
        is the number of ping pong balls that it takes 
        to fill a standard yellow school bus.

~~~
dmoney
Hint: you can fit more if you melt them.

~~~
quickpost
But then they are no longer ping pong balls... Just plastic goop.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
They never said the ping pong balls had to stay as ping pong balls.

I'd be thinking about filling the tires with liquid ping pong balls too, but
maybe I'd be missing the spirit of the question...

------
samd
Another thing I like to see is when the posting talks about what sort of
projects you'll be working on.

The latest example of this was GazeHawk's job posting:

 _"Eye tracking gives you a ton of data with a lot of dimensions. We want to
show that data to our users in a way that's easy to parse. That means
interactivity: HTML5, Canvas, JS."_

Just a single sentence, but it engaged me, got me thinking, and gave me a good
idea of the sort of projects they're working on.

~~~
argv_empty
_Another thing I like to see is when the posting talks about what sort of
projects you'll be working on._

Yes, for me this is critical. If there's nothing to convince me that it's not
just another job working on the same CRUD I could be working on at any other
place, I won't give the posting any further attention.

------
alexophile
_Don't look like a recruitment agency_ \- Absolutely. Even when my job search
was in its most desperate throes, I was reluctant to apply for any job that
wasn't straight-forward about who they were or what they did.

 _Guarantee a response_ \- I don't think a guarantee is all that necessary,
but a timetable for the process is always nice. Along those same lines, I
always greatly preferred postings that had an email address, even better if
it's a person's. But really, just something that indicates an active, rather
than passive process. Filling out a form and hitting submit just has a
hopeless, waiting-at-the-dmv feel to it.

------
drivingmenuts
I usually avoid anything that has the word "rockstar" or similar wording. To
me, it implies unrealistic expectations of knowledge and/or performance.

I will also avoid anything that has a long list of prerequisites. If there's
more than maybe five or so disparate technologies requiring multiple platform
knowledge, then the job you're offering should probably pay double what you're
offering.

~~~
larrik
When I was most recently looking for a job here in Connecticut, it seemed like
every job posting had "PHP", "Python", or even ".NET" in the title, and then
required 4+ years or so of Java as well. With no explanation.

I just assumed the poster had no idea what they are talking about, and moved
on.

(Edited for grammar)

~~~
loire280
I get a lot of emails from recruiters who obviously have no idea that Java and
Javascript are different languages. I wonder if many of those postings should
have said "Javascript" instead.

Anyone who says I'm a "strong candidate" for a big-corp Java job requiring 6+
years of Java experience after looking at my resume is very confused and won't
be getting a call.

~~~
akavlie
Bingo. This was definitely the case for a recent local freelancing/consulting
job post; an associate took up the position and tipped me off to the
Java/JavaScript mixup (though I don't think the post asked for X years
experience).

Something to consider though... if they can't even accurately name the
language, can they really judge the experience required in said language?

------
wccrawford
How about listing requirements that are actually requirements? If you don't
need 7+ years Mirah experience, don't ask for it. I never apply for jobs that
I don't actually fit the 'requirements'.

Every time I see someone ask for more experience than is possible for a
language, I wonder what other lies they're going to tell me or unreasonable
things they are going to expect.

~~~
do
Listing any required years experience with a particular technology seems like
a mistake.

A good engineer is a good engineer and shouldn't need N+ years experience with
a language/framework/tool to make an impact on a good team that's willing to
do a little training.

~~~
waterlesscloud
When I see something like "7+ years PHP experience", I wonder what it is they
think they're using that as a proxy for and why they don't just mention it
directly.

It's not like there's a standard progression in technologies where you learn
certain things in years 5-7, etc.

I can see there's a difference between say 1 years and 3 years, but is there
really a difference you can count on being true if someone used a tech for 5
years vs 3? 7 vs 3?

~~~
wallflower
> I wonder what it is they think they're using that as a proxy for and why
> they don't just mention it directly.

A very smart developer who I respect once said something like: when you are
young, you have lots of energy and want to learn/use the latest technology. As
you get older and gain more experience, you start to see the patterns. It's
not about the technology, there are repeated themes and solutions. But when
you start realizing this and have accumulated 7 years of experience, you may
be transitioning out and wanting to begin starting a family. So the people who
might be most qualified might be wanting to leave the intensity of coding for
the relative stability of management.

As someone once said - the entire premise of capitalism is based on overpaying
the first few years and underpaying you for the next 20 or 30 years.

So perhaps 7 years of experience is a cludgy filter for the relative
graybeards who understand that technology is just a tool, not an end.

~~~
endtime
>As someone once said - the entire premise of capitalism is based on
overpaying the first few years and underpaying you for the next 20 or 30
years.

Someone with no understanding of the term "captialism", apparently.

------
ig1
The problem is that a lot of these suggestions are very superficial and don't
consider the underlying reason companies are doing what they currently do.

For example if you specify a salary you end up anchoring the negotiations, if
a candidate is not quite up to the level you're looking for but you want to
hire them anyway, the candidate is much less likely to accept a job offer
where you offer a salary below what you stated in the ads, even if they would
have accepted it otherwise.

Furthermore you need to consider the impact disclosing salary levels has on
current employees, if the market is tough you may have to offer a salary above
what current employees are earning, which can be very damaging to morale and
can make your staff feel hostile towards the new hire from the start.

~~~
yannickt
I don't think the suggestions are superficial. A company does not need to
follow _every single one_ of these tips in order to increase their applicant
signal/noise ratio. Many companies would achieve this goal if they simply
refused to "look like a recruitment agency" and took the time to write job
posting for humans, and not robots. I tend to be turned off by completely
impersonal job postings, even when they list interesting technologies. Also,
imo, a company has little to gain and much to lose by trying too hard to be
cool: as stated in the article, you don't need ninjas, and you don't need to
tell us that you only hire the top 1% (if you have to say it, it probably
isn't true).

But you make a good point about the salary, and it is especially relevant for
large companies.

------
bphogan
When I post job ads now, I ask interns for their blog URL, websites they've
done, URLs to open-source projects, and their Twitter account if any. I'm not
looking to find out personal stuff, but I want examples of what they do, how
they learn, and if they'll be a fit for us.

When I used to just ask for a cover letter and resume, 99% of the people who
interviewed with me were just awful. Now I tend to get good dev interns who
want to be here and have similar drive and ambitions.

I'm not saying that a person who doesn't have any OSS experience, a blog, or a
Twitter account wouldn't be a good developer, but then if they're not
interested in OSS, teaching, doing things on their own (outside of
work/schoolwork) or sharing, then they may not be a good cultural fit.

~~~
drivingmenuts
What if they don't keep a blog? I'm pretty sure I have a decent amount of
technical information in my head, I just don't bother to blog about it.

As for Twitter ... seriously?

~~~
bphogan
I believe I already addressed that in my post - you could be an awesome
programmer. But would we be able to get along with eachother? Would you be
able to get along with the rest of the people who do use Twitter and who do
blog about what they learned? It's likely not, and now we can both look for
other opportunities.

~~~
krschultz
That's so arbitrary. There are plenty of devs on Twitter that I could never
ever get along with. Plenty not on twitter I could. There are plenty of people
blogging about their profession that are good at it, and plenty that are good
at it that are not blogging.

At my startup of the 8 devs, we had 2 on twitter and 3 with their own blogs,
so the bulk of us didn't do either. But we got along great. Why wouldn't we?
What does Twitter and blogging have to do with interpersonal relationships?

~~~
bphogan
Well, I did say "and twitter account if any". Looking at someone's twitter
stream who's poking at some new library or talking about some code they wrote
tells me a lot more than "1 year of php development" on a resume.

It may be arbitrary, but github+blog+twitter has worked well here.

~~~
Locke1689
Twitter is tricky. I very rarely if ever tweet about technical topics for a
couple reasons:

1\. I don't think anything technically interesting can be accurately explained
in the 140 characters provided by Twitter.

2\. Simply announcing what I'm working on is self-congratulatory back-patting.
No one cares what I'm working on that hour.

3\. I have many non-technical friends (e.g., no one else in my frat is CS). I
would not alienate them from a conversation by only talking about tech all the
time.

~~~
vanschelven
The same could be said for non-technical topics:

1\. I don't think anything interesting can be accurately explained in the 140
characters provided by Twitter.

2\. Simply announcing what I'm working on is self-congratulatory back-patting.
No one cares what I'm working on that hour.

3\. I have many friends with different interests. I would not alienate them
from a conversation by only talking about X all the time.

------
kp212
I would add as a couple of other tips:

1\. Provide a contact email, esp. for larger companies, filling out a n page
submission form is a killer.

2\. Use LinkedIn and the other boards not headhunters, Dice and Monster feel
like headhunter spam. At least with LinkedIn you can connect from a posting,
to a company to an HR person.

Personally I would love it if Dice had a filter headhunter option, but it
probably would kill their #1 revenue stream.

~~~
nathanh
Awesome tips. Indeed actually has an "Exclude staffing agencies" option on
their advanced search: <http://www.indeed.com/advanced_search>

~~~
kp212
That's the thing, we need employers to actually post for themselves with a
contact address. Your site is a form of that, where you connect with 10-15
direct employers, which is great. We need more of that on the boards, via
linkedin, maybe stack overflow, indeed, startuply. However I think this issue
affects larger corporations even more so, and they use Monster/Dice, how do
you improve that?

------
tocomment
I just saw a job posting that said they were looking for a "young and
energetic person". Isn't that illegal?

~~~
capstone
In the US, it is definitely illegal.

EEOC: _It is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference
for or discourages someone from applying for a job because of race, color,
religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability. For example, a help-wanted
ad that seeks "recent college graduates" may discourage people over 40 from
applying and may violate the law._

One exception is BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification). Some obvious
examples are labor jobs, religious education and the performing arts. There
are gray areas as well, such as a college-oriented start up hiring recent
college grads, however the company would need to prove that the age
requirement was necessary to perform the job in question. Personally, I think
it's rather hard to make that case for programmers.

Interestingly, a preference for minorities is not a BFOQ. It is illegal to
specify race or gender even if end goal is workplace diversity.

------
unoti
"Hirelite is on a mission to put headhunters out of business. We host speed
interviewing events using video chat where 20 job seekers talk to 20 companies
for 5 minutes each..."

Hey, what an awesome idea!

------
nhangen
Wow, this looks like the exact opposite type of person I'm looking for when I
hire.

I'm willing to pay high wages and even stake in the company, but if I do, that
person should be willing to work hard and be dedicated to the building quality
projects, rather than clocking in and out.

Is this how all developers feel? Do they all expect remote work?

I understand the need for working from home, but as a business builder, I like
being able to sit with a developer and plan and build together.

~~~
sp4rki
I'll go out on a limb and explain what developers 'feel'.

 _Say that you're comfortable with remote work_ \- In the case of a local
employee, I don't want to have to commute 5 days a week, 2 hours to an fro.
Sometimes I just don't feel well enough to go to the office, but I'm not as
bad as to not work at all. Sometimes I just need a change of scenery. In the
case of a international employee, sometimes the best person for the job will
not be a local hire. Sometimes it makes more business sense to hire cheaper
for a quality employee that doesn't operate out of your immediate area. You
can easily fly a developer over for a few days every month or two if you want
to discuss things in person, but most of the time a Skype call is more than
enough. Be flexible and you'll keep good developers happy enough to go all out
and really want to make YOUR product better.

 _Drop the degree requirement_ \- Not sure if you approve or disapprove here,
but if you're willing to pay high wages and stake in the company make sure
that you're not discriminating on formal education. The moment I find out that
I'm being payed less because I don't have a title, instead of it being because
of the quality of my work and my experience is the moment I start looking for
a new job. In my case, I've never been discriminated based on a diploma, and
more often than not I've been payed more than employees with degrees because
of proven experience and productivity.

 _Guarantee the job only requires 40 hours per week_ \- Hard work does not
mean that I should work 12 hours a day, not even because you pay 'high wages'.
You want quality projects? Keep your developers happy. Don't push them to put
work over families, social life, or hobbies. Be flexible, specially regarding
office hours. Do this and the day you tell them that you just got a retarded
deadline pushed a month early, you'll find developers working 80 ~ 100 hours a
week to get the project done. You reap what you sow so to speak. Of course,
you'll have to be a team player and give them a few weeks off the next week
though.

 _Offer to train people in a new language_ \- Offering benefits to further
your employees career makes almost any developer a happy camper. Buy them
books and send them to conferences. It's an investment that's well worth it.
I'm pretty sure you probably agree with this one, but it's important to point
it out nonetheless.

My point is that if you want great developers to feel at home in your company
and help you build a great product, you need to be as flexible and laid back
as possible towards your developers without, of course, giving in to
mediocrity. You might like employees that work 12 hours a day every day and
are always in the office by nine am, but the people you need are the ones that
will move your company forward, and more times than not this are the one's
that want their employment conditions to be 'fair' and easygoing.

~~~
nhangen
I'm fine with much of that, but only after someone proves that they deserve
it. To me, these seem more like rewards or perks than initial offerings.

As an employer, if someone comes in to my office with those requirements, they
need to show me that they can produce...otherwise, we're not starting off on
the right foot.

Can you imagine someone in any other field asking for the same? They would be
laughed out of the building. I'm not saying that makes it right or wrong...but
it's certainly interesting.

I guess my point, and what's most important to me, is not the tally of hours
worked, but someone's willingness to buy in to our product, and more
importantly, their ability to recognize the difference between getting by and
getting things done. Team goes both ways.

~~~
j_baker
That's interesting because I don't put in hard work until my employer proves
they deserve it. Someone has to make the first move. Do you see the dilemma
here?

~~~
nhangen
So you're saying a good salary is not enough to merit good work in return?

~~~
j_baker
That's exactly what I'm saying. Money only gets you so far, and first
impressions are hard to break. To _really_ make me give my all, I need to work
some place where I'm valued and not some cog in a machine. If my first
impression is that you view me as a machine that you put money in one end and
code comes out the other, then you'll have to work twice as hard to get rid of
that impression once I've proven myself to you (assuming I stick around long
enough _to_ prove myself to you).

~~~
nhangen
So what's value?

Respect in communication and expectations or letting you run the show?

~~~
j_baker
I didn't say anything that alluded to me (or any other employee) wanting to
run the show. Are you really attempting to get the most out of the employee-
employer relationship or are you trying to put down threats to your authority?

~~~
nhangen
No, this isn't about authority at all, at least for me. I just got the
impression that you were sort of drawing a line in the sand, and I was trying
to ascertain why. I'd still love more insight.

------
joe_the_user
These are generally really excellent points. I'll just quibble with a few:

* Say that you're comfortable with remote work

Uh, excuse me but don't say that unless you _know_ how to make a remote
situation work for someone. I would say instead, "be open to someone
relocating but make clear whether you'll pay for that or not". Ads saying
"local candidate only" are really obnoxious (what, does the person needs a
California passport or something?)

Further, a lot of this advice is along the lines of "be an absolutely fabulous
employer". And while I like the idea of employers becoming the absolute best,
on the way to that ideal they'll still be hiring employees. So really, I want
an ad that's going to reflect the real pluses and minuses of a less than
perfect employer. For example, don't say 40 hours a week unless you mean it,
etc.

------
Tycho
So do companies prefer it when candidates apply to them directly, or does that
just irritate them (ie. If they've used agencies/headhunters to advertise
their vacancies)?

------
fbnt
Honestly, If I were recruiting developers/creative/technical people the least
thing I'd be doing is write a job post.

------
axiom
I think this list doesn't go far enough.

Minimum salary should be $300k per year. Guaranteed zero overtime, and you get
to spend 25 of your 30 work hours per week on side projects or learning new
languages (from home, of course.)

Anything else is just oppressive and restricts creativity. If you say
otherwise you're probably just a lame business guy who hates hackers.

~~~
nathanh
I understand your comment. The list is very developer friendly. But it's just
meant to help companies that want to appeal a bit more to developers and get
more applications.

There are great companies with great people out there who just don't know what
developers are looking for. They don't have to implement all of these tips,
but maybe they'll be able to mix and match them with what already works at
their company.

~~~
axiom
I have to say that sometimes the sense of entitlement among developers here
gets to pretty absurd levels. There's an attitude that developers are the only
ones that matter, and anything that adds any kind of accountability is
oppressive.

$90k+ salary, guaranteed max of 40 hours per week and a few % equity at a
startup? if a sales rep or manager asked for something like that in an
interview they'd be called pompous. For example, if a startup has raised $500k
in funding, this would mean not only would they be spending 20% of their
funding on a single developer in the first year, but they'd give up a big
chunk of equity and get someone who has 3 other projects on the side they're
working on. That's seems fair? that doesn't smack of an entitlement complex?

p.s. I'm a developer and run a startup.

~~~
throwaway20
Salaried developer employees are different from founders or executives. I can
measure a founder's performance in terms of number of users or amount of
revenue. I've yet to see a meaningful numerical measure of developer output.
It is possible to meaningfully grade developer output only in qualitative
terms, not quantitative ones. Quantitative measures are oppressive. If you
want to rate me, I want someone to pay attention to what I'm actually doing,
and I want someone who is capable of understanding what's going on. That's not
asking too much. But that kind of investment means one manager is capable of
managing fewer people, and you have to have really talented managers, and so
people don't like it.

I have no problem with accountability. Very simply, if you need to keep tabs
on me (already a step down in the relationship), then I expect you to do it in
a qualitative fashion, with a person capable of evaluating progress. Closed
tickets and hour estimates and burndown charts and all the rest of that stuff
is a fiction, and it makes an incompetent manager look real busy when he is
actually doing nothing. And it wastes my time when I'm trying to do important
work.

They call these metrics time saving devices, but if you don't have time to go
around and peer at what's actually happening in the shop, then you aren't
actually evaluating anything.

You don't need a person to track metrics. If these fictions worked you could
set up a machine to track progress and send reminder emails, and even to fire
people who were consistently too far behind.

To put it in a not nice way, the managers at startups I've met were
experienced people who weren't skilled enough to cash out during the first
bubble, or who never made it to an executive position or to starting their own
company. They were untalented, and their advice was bad. If they had been
genuinely capable of showing me how to perform 10% better, I would have
received them as saints, or as angels from on high, and would probably have
spent as much time around them as possible. That was not the case.

The other reason people like metrics is because of the squeeze. You're already
operating under the assumption that I might not be working at full potential,
that's why you want the additional accountability. If I am working at full
potential, and you assume you can squeeze 5% more out of me, and start to
press down, then maybe you do get 5% more in the short run, but in the long
run you've caused a problem.

In their less guarded moments I've heard people in these positions claim their
job is to improve performance by just a few percentage points, and that will
justify their position. Multiplied over a department, these are huge gains.
Unfortunately, that's an exceedingly difficult proposition for someone without
special insight, and the only way it's going to happen is if they are in
control of the results metrics. Which they are.

Maybe you can recover a few percentage points in a clunky, inefficient
company. In a hot startup one overseer is not going to squeeze that much out.
They're just annoying.

I doubt you can get rid of middle managers. They're there for a reason.
Someone has to digest what's going on for the higher ups. But there's probably
a better way for them to do their jobs than inserting themselves where they
don't belong.

~~~
axiom
I guess you'll have to take my word for it that I'm not talking about the
obviously silly ways of making developers accountable (like LOC or tickets
closed.) I'm a developer, so I know that typically managers who don't know how
to code shouldn't be managing coders.

What I'm talking about is developers who demand above market wages, and
shorter hours (than lawyers, or doctors, or automotive engineers etc.) and
less commitment, and more equity. There are a lot of these guys out there, and
a lot of people on here who think like that. I'm saying that's a childish,
entitled attitude that ignores the reality of starting and building a company.
Sometimes you can't have it all.

~~~
warren_s
Unless you're hiring someone fresh out of school, they've likely had some
experience in the job market and base their expectations of salary and
conditions on that.

It's not really a sense of entitlement if I can point to similar positions x,
y, and z and ask why you're not offering the same, is it?

Expectations, whether or not you find them realistic, are not created in a
vacuum. I can't pay my mortgage or feed my kids on a "pre-money equity-only"
job. Taking a deep pay cut for a stake in NewCo? Been there before - at the
end of the day, 5% of nothing is still nothing.

If you're looking for someone who is willing to take a big risk for very
little (immediate) reward, you aren't looking for an employee, you're looking
for another co-founder.

~~~
axiom
I totally agree with you. That's exactly my goal in hiring early employees -
they are de facto co-founders that should get a ton of equity and a livable
salary.

If someone wants 90k and 40 hour work weeks they should go work at Microsoft
or IBM. That's not how successful startups are built. You need to be ultra
frugal, extremely dedicated (to the point of obsession) and have lots of
exposure to the up side.

