4 ms·

What is the company looking for, in one sentence? Why? Why now? List the tech stack, that is important. List a real salary range. A lot of places won't do

by Spoom 8y ago

What is the company looking for, in one sentence? Why? Why now? List the tech stack, that is important. List a real salary range. A lot of places won't do this because they feel like they might be missing out on a deal, but listing the range lets candidates filter themselves in or out of the job immediately (and good ones will try to find out the range anyway from external sites such as Glassdoor or Paysa, which might be inaccurate and thus result in a lot of wasted time). Tell me that you're hiring for a direct, full time employee position. (Otherwise, I'm just not interested at all. Contract-to-hire is an immediate fail.) List benefits. Tell me the day to day of one of the people on the team, written by that person. List requirements but be open-minded. An experienced-enough engineer can learn a lot very quickly. Local only? If not, is there a relocation package? Is there travel involved? Is the position open to remote? (If so, list this early in the ad as it will attract a lot more attention.) Tell me what your interview process will look like. Highlight what you believe differentiates your company from others, especially as relates to the potential hire's day-to-day.

tfehring 8y ago
This is pretty much my list. I'll second the salary point in particular - if I can't get the salary range from you, I'll get it from Glassdoor, and if I can't get it from either you or Glassdoor, I probably won't apply. One other point I'll expand on a bit: > List requirements but be open-minded. An experienced-enough engineer can learn a lot very quickly. Be thoughtful and explicit about which requirements are firm and which aren't. I think of a firm requirement as one for which any resumes lacking it are automatically thrown in the trash, full stop. Or, equivalently, any requirement for which you can say f'I wouldn't hire {best_hacker_you_know} for this position if they didn't have {requirement}.' With this in mind, it may be reasonable to have 0 firm requirements for a position if you trust your interview process, and it's probably suboptimal to have more than a handful of them. Assume that there are good candidates who will treat every requirement as a firm one unless you explicitly state otherwise, and who will only apply if they meet all of them. Because there are. Chances are, you don't want to miss out on good candidates who know most of your stack like the back of their hand but decide not to apply because you "require" MySQL experience and they only know Postgres.
- Spoom 8y ago
  Piggybacking on this, please run your ad by your technical staff. They know the position better than you do, and can tighten up the real requirements of the position.

by Spoom 8y ago

tfehring 8y ago

This is pretty much my list. I'll second the salary point in particular - if I can't get the salary range from you, I'll get it from Glassdoor, and if I can't get it from either you or Glassdoor, I probably won't apply. One other point I'll expand on a bit: > List requirements but be open-minded. An experienced-enough engineer can learn a lot very quickly. Be thoughtful and explicit about which requirements are firm and which aren't. I think of a firm requirement as one for which any resumes lacking it are automatically thrown in the trash, full stop. Or, equivalently, any requirement for which you can say f'I wouldn't hire {best_hacker_you_know} for this position if they didn't have {requirement}.' With this in mind, it may be reasonable to have 0 firm requirements for a position if you trust your interview process, and it's probably suboptimal to have more than a handful of them. Assume that there are good candidates who will treat every requirement as a firm one unless you explicitly state otherwise, and who will only apply if they meet all of them. Because there are. Chances are, you don't want to miss out on good candidates who know most of your stack like the back of their hand but decide not to apply because you "require" MySQL experience and they only know Postgres.

Spoom 8y ago
Piggybacking on this, please run your ad by your technical staff. They know the position better than you do, and can tighten up the real requirements of the position.