A Review of 3 Hacker News Jobs Listings

A Review of 3 Hacker News Jobs Listings(danshapiro.com)

64 points by giladvdn 13 years ago | 30 comments

(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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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.

EwanG 13 years ago | | |

I find this interesting because one of the first questions most HR folks ask is what salary range (or hourly rate if consulting) you are expecting. So it's fine if they ask first?

I'm afraid I've gotten to the point where I put my salary or rate in bold in my messages because it quickly winnows out the recruiters who want 10 years experience for a starting salary/rate, and those who didn't actually read my message. I know the later because before I schedule the first call I point out that my rate was in my message and "they're ok with that?"

Personally (control group of 1) the only thing that would get me to move from my current position is if it was a completely remote opportunity. In that case I am less curious about dollars since giving me something I want is worth giving you something you want :-)

adrianhoward 13 years ago | | |

Job Advert is not the worst way to find somebody

Well - in my experience and the experience of everybody else I know in recruitment they're less effective than getting direct recommendations and having a good recruiter. YMMV of course ;-)

No HR professional would agree with you that quoting salary on job advert is good idea.

I know several HR professionals who would disagree with you on that.

The issues that you mentioned do exist (although if you're paying new hires more than existing employees then that's a whole different barrel of problem).

However - they pale into insignificance compared to the increase in qualified candidates that you get applying (and to a lesser experience a decrease in the unqualified and deluded).

It's been my experience on multiple occasions when I've been helping companies hire on developers that adding a salary to the job descriptions gets you better candidates.

freework 13 years ago | |

"Best way is personal recommendation."

I somewhat disagree. What I've found is that great programmers are networked up with other great programmers. Crappy programmers are networked up with other crappy developers. If you only ever hire from within your existing employee's network, you'll only ever get more of the same. If you're expanding your team, you are going to want to get people who are better than what you already have.

rtpg 13 years ago | |

> Unfortunately, in my experience anyway, good agents are rarer than gold dust in the IT industry.

Considering all the gold in computer parts (or so I've heard), seems like we get a good deal then. (/pedantic)

Is it even a good idea for a startup to try and recruit through classifieds? In small teams it seems like knowing people beforehand goes a long way to quickly integrating into the team (and thus going along with the "release fast and often" we all so cherish). People in startups probably know other relatively smart people, and the cost of learning the tools would seem to be outweighed by the advantages brought by the social dynamics.

Do people in startups have friends? Do they find the time to hang around with people outside their own business to work on those sorts of relations?

carterschonwald 13 years ago | |

Well said! Could not articulate this better myself, even though I rant about various elements of this matter at least once a week! :)

Seriously, great job summarizing all the different knobs that matter.

Now if only people could manage to follow these pretty reasonable rules of thumb.

Admission: I've actually helped a few friends write better job descriptions for their businesses, a good quality job description makes such a huge difference.

uglytom 13 years ago | |

A great, insightful analysis!

I definitely agree with the point that for hiring, recommendations go a long way in terms of filtering out so many of the "liars" and "deluded" that you discussed. I feel like in any setting, using your network of individuals that have already gained your trust to expand that network is a good and effective way to progress.

grdvnl 13 years ago | | |

>> 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....

This alone is a one of the biggest inhibitors for some great people I know. These days all startups claim their culture is as cool as any startup culture can get. So, I feel there isn't any differentiating factor in quotes like 'disrupting something' most of the time. I believe a good advert would be one which gives sufficient information that motivates good candidates(who usually have good jobs already) explore other options.

fencepost 13 years ago | |

Well-done job ads might not be so bad, particularly if well-placed. I suspect that companies probably do pretty well with http://careers.stackoverflow.com, for example, in part because they're advertising within a community where they can get a feel for applicants as well.

eduardordm 13 years ago |

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.

emperorcezar 13 years ago |

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...

niggler 13 years ago |

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

manys 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago |

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

https://github.com/about/jobs

https://squareup.com/careers/engineering

danshapiro 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

So good I filled it out. :)

tmarthal 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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

donnfelker 13 years ago |

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