
Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you - leeny
http://blog.interviewing.io/3-exercises-to-create-the-kind-of-employer-brand-that-actually-makes-engineers-want-to-work-for-you/
======
granshaw
Seeing a pattern here on Engineers just calling it as it is, and wanting
employers to do so too.

It ain't gonna happen - its the same thing as in PR-speak where a company will
deny wrongdoing, speak in platitudes, etc, even when everyone and their dog
knows what the real story is.

Engineers will just need to do their own due dilligence and find out through
other avenues what the culture and working conditions are really like - I
think this is just the reality of corporate culture. There are very real and
tangible benefits of being employed and having a stable month-to-month
paycheck, instead of striking out on your own, and the sooner everyone just
accepts these annoyances and moves on with life, the sooner they can
concentrate on the things that really matter.

Basically, don't hate the players, hate the game.

~~~
neogodless
From an employer's perspective:

We already understand our own value. We probably overlook our faults. We don't
trust potential employees to be as good as we want. We'll make it hard for you
to work for us, and try not to pay you more than the value you provide. You
need a job - try to prove your worth to us, and we'll consider letting you
work for us.

From an employee's perspective:

We know we're one of the worthwhile employees. (We probably overlook our
faults.) We don't trust potential employers to be a place we'll actually enjoy
working. We don't want to work hard to prove ourselves - we expect you to win
us over. We expect you to pay us a little above market value (since we're
above average.) You need employees to exist and get work done - try to prove
we'll enjoy working for you, and we'll consider giving you our expertise and
time.

Both parties will withhold information in an attempt to appear better than the
other so that initial negotiations go in their favor. The interview process
will fail to disclose all relevant and interesting information about how well
the two parties are suited to each other.

Beyond the general negotiation/trust problem, what are problems unique to
engineers and their prospective employers, and how do we improve upon them in
mutually beneficial ways?

~~~
JohnFen
> Both parties will withhold information in an attempt to appear better than
> the other so that initial negotiations go in their favor.

I try very hard not to do this. When I'm interviewing for a position, I'm
trying to determine honestly whether or not I'm a good fit for that employer,
and that employer's assessment of how good a fit I may be is an important part
of that.

Fit is important to me because when I'm on board, I'm on board 100%. It's a
large commitment for me, and I want to minimize error.

So I try to be honest about my weaknesses as well as my strengths, to allow
the employer to make a better assessment about fit. That greatly benefits me
in the end.

No employee (or employer) is perfect, and a large part of what makes a good
fit is if the imperfections are things that are tolerable by the other.

------
avgDev
Honestly, I just want to work for a company that is honest, it does not have
to be the most exciting work, as long as hours are flexible and at least some
remote work is offered.

I'm tired of recruiters try to hype up the company. If employer said, "Our
product is not exciting but we offer great benefits, you just have to put in
30-35 hours a week, come to few meetings and meet reasonable deadlines that we
agreed upon" I'm sold. I don't need ping pong table. I want decent salary,
decent benefits and kind/honest coworkers.

~~~
newfangle
Im sorry but 30 to 35 hours a week, especially at a startup is just not
tenable for any company except a small lifestyle company

Also i have to laugh at the fact that you "just" want to work at a company
thats honest and then you throw in the 30 to 35 hour work week requirement

~~~
toomuchtodo
I work at an enterprise less than 40 hours a week. I hear from recruiters 3-4
times a week. I don't care about your mission or your culture, just pay me, I
do the work, and then go home.

If someone is of the opinion these sorts of orgs don't exist, I put forth that
they might not have looked hard enough, and would encourage further
exploration to better understand the employment landscape. If you're a startup
and expecting workaholics for under market rate with a trivial amount of
equity, I can imagine you would be upset your hiring pipeline isn't as robust
as you would hope.

~~~
newfangle
No not under market rate, if your goal is to work 30 to 35 hours a week under
market rate all power to you but if you expect to be getting paid $400k total
compensation or more you better be giving me at least 40 hours of work that i
expect from a senior engineer. 5 to 10 hours is a full day of work.

~~~
eropple
You realize that _a vanishingly tiny slice of developers_ make $400K a year,
yes? Yeah, sure, a few companies pay that kind of money to a subset of their
people. Nobody else does.

And that's fine. I'd have a hard time not sawing off a hand before working at
three and maybe four of the "FAANG" group. And I like having a life, so I'll
leave money on the table all day long.

------
jaden
> we found that brand strength didn’t matter at all when it came to either
> whether the candidate wanted to move forward or how excited the candidate
> was to work at the company

This quote came as a surprise.

~~~
munchbunny
I think their follow-up thesis this is accurate:

 _Maybe the most realistic thing we can say is that while brand likely matters
a lot for getting candidates in the door, once they’re in, no matter how well-
branded you are, they’re yours to lose._

When I was interviewing, that was entirely true. Visibility and branding
matters for initial contact. After that, I turned down interviews for all
sorts of reasons. Interviewers that lacked social skills, interviews that
asked for too much work, interviews where once I met the team I decided it
wasn't a good product, and in one particularly egregious case a recruiter who
initially asked for a resume then didn't respond until a month later with a
two sentence message that the position got filled but was there another one I
wanted to apply for?*

Based on my experiences job searching, if it weren't for all sorts of perverse
incentives and bad actors who would mess up a name-and-shame blacklist, I'd
wholly support such a list.

------
bitwize
If you want to hire and retain good engineering talent, try communicating
(honestly) that you provide them private or semi-private work space, state of
the art tools, their choice of editor/OS where applicable, and don't railroad
them constantly with rigid adherence to this or that process methodology nor
expect them to work crunch hours (except maybe in very rare circumstances).
That'll get you more payoff per unit effort than tailoring your marketing
pitch.

------
JohnFen
A company that worries about "how to craft a brand" that appeals to engineers
automatically falls a few notches in my estimation.

I want to work for a company that does interesting things, provides good
support for engineers, behaves in a responsible fashion, and treats their
employees well. Branding is irrelevant.

------
andbberger
Alright come on. If you want your engineers to pour their souls into your dumb
startup, you need to align their incentives with yours.

There's a very simple way to do that: give them ownership

Otherwise, why should I care? I don't get paid a single cent more for coming
in and kicking ass everyday vs. just showing up and phoning it in.

------
pnathan
Aline says good things here - as always - but I want to note that an overly
groomed company or one where many of the employees are pushing the company's
job openings starts to feel really bogus.

In other words, if you take this too far, it becomes obviously painted on and,
to use an old word, the recruiters become "posers".

But if you earnestly take her advice, I think that it's a good write up.
Honestly talk about your unique point as a company. Who you are. Why you are.
What you uniquely do. No BS. I maximize my corporate BS sensor when I'm job
hunting.

------
thrower123
Pay good money. Moreover, provide meaningful raises as experience and
expertise increases, and in line with the external job market. Don't hire in
new hires above the salaries of your experienced employees that have to then
train and babysit the new folks for six months to a year and clean up their
messes.

Provide a private workspace (ideally private offices) where your knowledge
workers can do their job without distraction. Don't cheap out on equipment and
tooling and learning materials - it's moronic to quibble about buying an SSD
or a monitor or a piece of software or a book that costs a couple of hours of
your employee's hourly rate.

Provide clear direction, without micromanagement or silly infantile circle-
time processes. Don't engage in ad-hoc walking-around status checks, don't
demand immediate responses to asynchronous communications. Don't waste time in
superfluous meetings.

Don't vacillate or chase after every customer request. When one of your
employees says that something is unwise, and provides solid reasons, listen,
and don't go around them to find a stooge who will obey your whims and slag in
a big pile of technical debt.

Don't try to push any culty workplace culture stuff. Treat your employees like
the highly paid professionals they are. Respect their time and other
obligations.

------
danielvinson
If somebody wants to work for me and really, honestly, cares if our tech stack
is new and fancy (as opposed to practical/easy to maintain/easy to hire for),
that is a HUGE red flag that they are going to leave after a few years or
suggest major technology changes that are not in the best interest of the
company.

------
asark
1) Remote.

2) Money.

3) Demonstrate that you have half a clue how to run a project.

4) BONUS ROUND: No hours-long puzzle-question-memorization interview bullshit
if you're not paying FAANG money and providing FAANG levels of résumé
prestige.

~~~
dbcurtis
Does F still have resume prestige? I predicted more than 10 years ago that
someday having worked at Facebook would be the resume stain that you wear for
life. Has it not yet come to pass that having worked at Facebook is a red
flag? Sure, you are probably smart. But _anybody_ that lists Facebook on their
resume is going to find a lot of their interview time with me going to probing
their ethics.

~~~
Phlarp
I would agree the resume prestige has diminished from what it once was, but I
think it's a little far to suggest that any rank and file ENGINEER would have
compromised ethics just from choosing to work there. Facebook uses cutting
edge tech and pays really well, I would never hold it against an engineer
young or old for accepting a position that very likely offered more
compensation than they've ever had before.

If you are interviewing Facebook execs or management it would seem reasonable
to question their ethics.

~~~
c0vfefe
In fact we can tell from Googlers commenting here on HN that individual
engineers often disagree with some of the practices of their (huge) employer.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
Then they should quit. Stand up for what's right.

If the engineers quit, the company can't do it anymore.

They are all accomplices. For whatever reason they don't stop and thus their
ethics are compromised.

------
gwbas1c
One thing that needs to be added:

Job descriptions need to state where the job is, and/or if they allow
telecommuting.

That's the first thing I look for. Now that I have a two-income family, I will
not move under any circumstances.

------
Jackson-Solway
I can add a few things here. (I'm a cofounder at Job Portraits[1], an employer
branding studio in SF.)

In our experience, successful employer brands turn on a startup's willingness
to be transparent. Everyone in the Bay Area (not just engineers) has a
bloodhound's nose for bullshit. I can't overemphasize this—the norm is
vicious, laugh-in-your-face skepticism.

Our best projects are with startups who get this, and the solution isn't
rocket science: you have to address your struggles.

Marketing teams are most likely to balk at revealing their company's flaws,
but what's surprised us is how often technical leaders also refuse to address
their team's shortcomings. In part this is because technical folks are deeply
skeptical of anything their recruiting teams want (that's another story), but
it's also a function of embarrassment...or even outright shame.

The classic case is the eng leader at a small startup who was previously at a
FAANG company. They've spent the last few years as part of a well-oiled
machine—but now everything is broken! Processes aren't just inefficient—they
don't exist! The mobile app doesn't just suck—nobody knows how to fix it
because that one guy who built it ditched for a FAANG job! (Oops.)

A huge part of our job, as an agency, is coaching leaders to see transparency
as a competitive advantage. We say something like, "This isn't about
confessing your sins. It's about revealing challenges that the right engineers
will be THRILLED to solve." It's not that [thing] is broken; instead tell
candidates that "this is an opportunity to implement [thing] the way you've
always wanted." It's not that your failure to build [blah] is hurting the
business; instead tell candidates to "come build mission-critical
infrastructure." And the more specific you are, the better.

This is a mindset shift more than anything, and when we're able to pull it off
it opens the door to an employer brand that candidates will trust.

Oh, and a quick note for any product marketing people who are reading this:
Jobs are not products. You can't return them to the store or ask for a refund.
Every person your company hires is taking a huge gamble on you. If you only
'put your best face forward' with an employer branding project, you risk
emotional apocalypse if, during the person's first 30 days, they realize they
were misled by a rosy employer brand. Tread carefully!

As we like to say, assume your audience (candidates) is as smart, or smarter,
than you are. Even if they don't trust you, you need to trust them to self-
select in—or self-select out—and the only way they can do that is with the
truth.

[1] [https://www.jobportraits.com/](https://www.jobportraits.com/)

