
Creating Effective Job Adverts - Peroni
https://blog.honest.work/creating-effective-job-adverts/
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cateye
Salary range is the most strategically left out signal that most job seekers
look for.

In most cases it is a waste of time for both sides. But I guess that companies
have an advantage in the end by creating this opaqueness.

~~~
gitgud
Salary is often negotiated on a person to person basis. One of the first rules
of negotiation:

“Whoever mentions a number first, loses”

As the other negotiator knows the expected salary and can undermine it...

~~~
mdorazio
As others have mentioned, this rule only applies to negotiations where one
side is willing to offer more than the other side expects. If you're expecting
$150k and the company only has budget for $120k the opportunity cost of
engaging in a lengthy interview process to find that out is rather bad.

A better rule of thumb for in-demand professionals (in my experience on both
sides of the table) is to do your homework ahead of time, have a realistic
understanding of what you're worth and what the company is likely able to
offer, and name a price that's a little bit above that. You'll save a lot of
time and weed out low-balling recruiters immediately without actually
sacrificing much in the way of compensation.

~~~
UweSchmidt
The company also wants to attract lots of people who would be happy with (say)
$90k, and not anchor anywhere above unless necessary. If you expect a number
of people applying, chances are good that someone is willing to be underpaid
for whatever reason, and this fact is huge for companies.

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philipodonnell
Does anyone have a contrasting opinion? The article seems to focus on just not
explaining with enough specificity what they want, but I find this is
extremely common so shouldn't overly effect one particular employer. In fact,
I found this job post to be quite well written. The scope is a bit wide
(40-120K is quite a range) but I feel like good applicants will know whats
expected at different points on that range.

[https://s3.eu-
west-2.amazonaws.com/honest.work/posts/effecti...](https://s3.eu-
west-2.amazonaws.com/honest.work/posts/effective-job-adverts/bright-cove-
advert.png)

Part of me thinks this might be over generalizing from a small sample size,
i.e., does honest.work get enough traffic that a lack of applicants is truly
indicative of quality. Of course there is also the fact that by pricing by the
job advert they naturally encourage overly-broad adverts for broadly similar
jobs, so that's probably not helping.

~~~
Peroni
This definitely isn’t a contrasting opinion as I’m the OP and co-founder of
Honest Work but for context, the original role Brightcove posted had over 5k
unique hits, a lot of which came from the Go subreddit and a highly relevant
Go community here in the UK so they definitely had a substantial number of the
right people looking at the post.

~~~
philipodonnell
It's still sort of a sample size of one, though. This content would have been
more effective if you had an analysis of some factor that measured your
hypothesis (length of posting, salary range width) and showed the correlation
with conversions. Then this could have been an illustrative case study backing
that up. Even better would be the results of the changes, maybe offer for free
to turn this into a junior and senior postings and see the difference multiple
posts with narrower ranges makes.

The holy Grail of data science is solid math foundation, benefits your clients
(more apps), benefits you (more revenue, higher satisfaction), and
demonstrates your effectiveness with data and willingness to continually
improve.

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starikovs
Honestly, I feel pain when I read most of job adverts/postings. They have a
lot of text, they're too verbose, etc.. Why can't recruiters just specify
things what developers interested in? These things can be found in different
surveys like the Stackoverflow's one.

