[HN Gopher] Avoiding the audience paradox when writing job descr...
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Avoiding the audience paradox when writing job descriptions
Author : leeny
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-09-23 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.interviewing.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.interviewing.io)
| buescher wrote:
| Frequently the primary audience for a job description is
| recruiters.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The trick to writing a great job description is not to write it
| at all.
|
| I've seen HR depts with spreadsheets and lists of acronyms and
| frameworks and really none of that matters. and "very competitive
| salaries" but absolutely no numbers anywhere.
|
| You want to find the person you're going to hire, then write the
| job description. You're looking for fast learners and innovators,
| they can learn a framework in a few days at most.
|
| For college hires, just sponsor a prize at your local school's
| hackathon. Anyone you meet there with an interesting project just
| bring onsite for an interview. For more experienced devs, better
| go with internal recommendations. Your top performers all have
| friends, and some of them might be bored right now.
|
| And be upfront with the numbers; You'll waste less time. I knew
| someone who wasted 5 rounds of interview with someone (this was
| outside the Valley) before revealing compensation. The candidate
| just flat out said he needed 3x or it just wasn't worth his time.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| This probably works well for smaller scale hiring. At a medium
| org, you want to make sure to source diverse candidates and
| hire without bias. (We all have biases!)
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Medium org just means you can fly in-out folks/reach other
| target schools.
|
| Diversity and biases are great, but ultimately what matters
| is finding out candidates that can scale the business and
| help it grow.
| darkerside wrote:
| Most effective way I've found of keeping out the noise is to put
| a few screening questions in place. Easy ones, maybe even a three
| line code sample (something that's almost fun to write).
| thrill wrote:
| You know how a cool job description is written? Salary and equity
| first, very short list of mandatory technologies second, nice to
| have third, and nothing about how cool the company is. If the
| first three items attract someone then they're going to google
| the place and figure that out.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I never got a job description with the salary information, even
| when I was cold-called, anywhere in Europe.
| avgDev wrote:
| I build a relationship with a few recruiters in the US, and I
| specifically told them that I don't want to waste their time
| and to start off with a compensation package any time they
| have something interesting. I cannot even comprehend
| discussing a job without salary range.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Ive lived in the top two tech city in EU (edit: Europe as of
| now) London and Berlin and there were always ranges in job
| specs, now I'm in Amsterdam and it's the only city that
| doesn't seem to like that (along with coding turning on the
| brain, i would say)
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| A few days ago I was contacted by a British company for a
| remote job, no salary disclosed. I heard that in UK it is
| disclosed, but I cannot confirm.
| ye_olde_gamer wrote:
| I would hate to work for a company that treats me as commodity
| labor, bidding for my time but none of my values or interests.
|
| That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but
| how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself.
| rualca wrote:
| > That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no),
| but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of
| itself.
|
| If only I had $1 for each time I saw a company showing off
| foosball tables, game consoles in the hallway, picnics, team
| get-togethers, people laughing and being cheerful.... And in
| the end it's the same cubic hellhole where people are no
| better than anonymous cogs in the machine.
| ye_olde_gamer wrote:
| Did someone order dehumanizing capitalism with a side of
| inevitable jadedness?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Which is great, until every job application reads as the
| exact same mix of positive adjectives and power words and you
| learn to skip the first 1-2 paragraphs of every one.
| ye_olde_gamer wrote:
| Only if you limit yourself to a particular kind of company,
| I think? I've worked as a dev for decades, but not for
| proper, actual tech companies... mostly a mixture of small
| biz and nonprofits. No two orgs were alike, even though my
| job at each one was very similar.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I didn't say the jobs were alike, I said the job listings
| were alike.
| ye_olde_gamer wrote:
| Not the ones I've applied to. If a company can't even
| tell you about itself without hyperbole, why bother?
| ecshafer wrote:
| I agree with a lot of these points. I hate how most job
| descriptions are written, a lot of people that want x years of
| language and y years of framework, which I think that should be
| relatively rare.
|
| What I want in a job description is "We work on X project with Y
| framework and Z back end", just say what you are working on and
| if I am interested in that. Then for the requirements make it X
| years of experience in domain, Y years of being a lead. Unless
| you are really needing that specific subject matter expert,
| having those requirements doesn't make sense. If I am hiring a
| senior developer for a Java position I don't really care if you
| have 5 years of Python, C#, C++, Ruby or whatever, but 5 years of
| backend experience could be helpful.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| 4 pieces of anecdotical data:
|
| 1. I stopped writing good job descriptions when hiring because HR
| always killed it: they cut mine to half and add their crap all
| over. I had open positions for SQL DBAs for 9 months, all
| candidates were developers in the best case and BI in the worst
|
| 2. From time to time I receive calls on LinkedIn with X years of
| experience required, where X was even 15. When I asked about it
| (I had more, I was just curious) they said the real number is
| X/2, but they wanted to cut off people with very low experience
| that are rounding up.
|
| 3. No job description in Europe that I've seen included any
| useful info on salary. All the discussions in the past 2-3 years
| ended when I found they were offering below the market and below
| current level. All this time could have been saved on both sides
| if at least some range would have been offered. This applies even
| for positions where they made me 1 offer per week with increasing
| salary (a few percent) for 2-3 months in a row, which is
| incredibly stupid.
|
| 4. In the past 2-3 years I never saw a job description that
| looked really professional and interesting. The positions were
| more interesting than the descriptions.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Four practical "exercises" when writing JDs to help prioritize
| the knowledge and experiences you expect this person to bring:
|
| 1) Pretend you only have 100 words. Simple stuff, but getting
| ruthless is a good way to prioritize.
|
| 2) Write an "anti-JD": the type of person you don't want for the
| role. A tip: focus on unconscious competencies - things you
| expect the person to know on day 1.
|
| 3) (Similar to Aline's litmus test in the article of "Can most
| companies say this about the work they're doing") If you can
| write "Only an idiot wouldn't ... " in front of the line, it's
| not a good differentiator.
|
| 4) Imagine you were going to ask the person you hire for this
| role to give 5 lunch and learns their first week on the job. What
| would the topics be and to what depth would you expect them to
| go?
|
| Also, at least in my experience, the easiest way to deter "noise"
| from unqualified applicants is to be clear what the first
| interview will consist of and how it will be passed/failed.
|
| "We expect you to come prepared to discuss the pros and cons of
| the following, citing previous work as much as possible: (insert
| relevant topics from exercises above e.g. computer vision,
| DevOps, Redux, recent famous papers in your field, etc)
| Candidates without experience or evaluated below an intermediate
| level of knowledge will not proceed."
| amriksohata wrote:
| Company: we offer very competitive salaries
|
| Candidate: then why are you hiding the salary on your job
| description?
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(page generated 2021-09-23 23:02 UTC)