This post is a translation of something I wrote in French for Human Coders. They asked me what would be the ideal job post from a developer's standpoint:
How whould you write a job announcement attracting good developers? Most recruiters complain that finding the right candidates is an ordeal.
If you ask me, it is due to very old recruitment practices: writing job posts for paper ads (where you pay by the letter), spamming them to as many people as possible, mandating fishy head hunters... This has worked in the past, but things changed. A lot more companies are competing to recruit developers, and many more developers are available, so separating the wheat from the chaff is harder.
We can do better! Let's start from scratch. For most candidates, a job posting is the first contact they'll have with your company. It must be attrctive, exciting! When I read "the company X is the leader on the market of Y", I don't think that they're awesome, I just wonder what they really do.
A job posting is a marketing document. Its purpose is not to filter candidates, but to attract them! And how do you write a marketing document?
YOU. TALK. ABOUT. THE. CLIENT. You talk about his problems, his aspirations, and only then, will you tell him how you will make things better for him. For a job posting, you must do the same. You talk to THE candidate. Not to multiple candidates, not to the head hunter or the HR department, but to the candidate. Talk about the candidate, and only the candidate. When a developer looks for a job, she doesn't want to "work on your backend application" or "maintain the web server". That is what she will do for you. This is what she wants:
- getting paid to write code
- work on interesting technologies
- a nice workplace atmosphere
- learn
- etc.
A good job posting should answer the candidate's aspirations, and talk about the career path. Does this job lead to project management? Do you propose in-house training? Is there a career path for expertise in your caompany?
Do you share values with your candidate? I do not mean the values written by your sales team and displayed on the "our values" page of your website. I am talking about the values of the team where the candidate will end up. Do they work in pair programming? Do they apply test driven development? There is no best way to work, the job can be done in many ways, so you must make sure that the candidate will fit right in.
What problem are you trying to solve with your company? Do you create websites that can be managed by anyone? Do you provide secure hosting? Whatever your goal is, talk about it instead of talking about the product. I do not want to read, "our company develops a mobile server monitoring tool", because that is uninteresting. If I read "we spent a lot of time on call for diverse companies, so we understood that mobility is crucial for some system administrators, so we created a tool tailored for moving system administrators", I see a real problem, a motivation to work, a culture that I could identify to.
By talking that way to the candidate, you will filter candidates on motivation and culture instead of filtering on skills. That can be done later, once you see the candidate You did not really think that a resume was a good way to select skilled people, do you?
Here is a good example of fictive job posting, from a company aggregating news for developers, looking for a Rails developer:
"You are a passionnate Ruby on Rails developers, you are proiud of you unit tests, and you enjoy the availability of Heroku's services? That's the same for us!
At Company X, we love developers: all of our services are meant for their fulfillment. We propose a news website about various technologies, higly interesting trainings and a job board for startups.
Our employees benefit fully from these services, and make talks in conferences all around France. By directly talking with other developers, they quickly get an extensive knowledge of current technologies.
Our news website is growing fast, so we need help to scale it. The web app uses Heroku and MongoDB, with a CoffeeScript front end. Are you well versed in Rails optimization? If yes, we would love to talk with you!"
Note that I did not talk about years of experience, or a city. I want to hire a Rails developer, not necessarily a french developer. I want someone with experience in optimization, not someone over 27.
With such a job posting, you will receive a lot more interesting employment applications. Now, are you afraid that it will incur a lot more work? The solution in a future post: how to target candidates efficiently? Get away from job boards!