Job Posts That Sell

If you're recruiting for nerd jobs, your best bet is probably to speak some nerd-ese. In particular, nerds find the bulleted lists collegial and painless to read; if they're skimming, they find medium-length well-written prose grafs slightly (or significantly) more painful. Remember that these are the same people who will write "tl;dr" comments on message boards.

Having said that, if you're recruiting for nerd jobs, you'd better be selling from the jump. The lede in this blog post is absolutely correct. There's a fierce market out there for strong talent. If your job post is a short blurb about your company and a list of boring requirements, then Jamie is right: that post isn't doing anything for you.

So I think you take a middle ground: write pithy bulleted text, but make the bullets sell. Nerds like "concrete". It helps to know that some technical "requirements" sell a job, and others don't: an "Experience in Java and J2EE environments" bullet is going to hurt you, but a "Comfortable learning to build complex systems in Scala and Postgres" probably picks up points.

But the best advice on this thread I think traces to Jamie: whatever bullets you write, they should sell the job. If you can sell the job, you'll get good candidates, and screening them manually won't be a pain.

Here's how I'd do ours in this hybrid style (we're always hiring, FWIW) --- this isn't how I'd normally write a job ad (I don't want my postings to look like job ads), but just to illustrate:

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Matasano is a trusted security advisor to many of the industry's most interesting companies. We do application security: companies pay us to find startling new ways to break their applications. We're looking for someone who could work at any of the best software companies in the world to join a team breaking apps at all the best software companies in the world.

Things to know about us:

* Founded in 2005 and profitable many years running

* Offices in NYC, Chicago, and SFBA

Specific things we're looking for:

* Ability and enthusiasm for coding. Our day-to-day is solving security problems with code.

* Total lack of fear. Our teams switch on a dime from attacking electronic trading markets to reverse engineering compiled code on FPGA-synthesized CPUs. We don't need you to know how to write a Dalvik decompiler or write a fuzzer for the MongoDB wire protocol. We just need you to want to know how.

* Deep interest in appsec. People who are good at breaking apps love breaking apps.

* Fluent with web stacks. From HTTP to Javascript to the rendering quirks of Webkit, and on through Rails and Django, and how their ORMs work. You'd want to to understand low-level web development well enough so that you could figure out a new stack in hours, not days.

* Comfort with C programming. Appreciated but not required. If you don't know C, we'll want to teach it to you.

Benefits:

* Working in an office culture with a team of people who write debuggers for fun and leaving the office every day in time to have dinner with your family.

* High probability that you'll learn more in this role than any role you've had prior. This year we've written clients for trading protocols, implemented exploit code for cryptanalytic attacks, exploited browser memory corruption bugs, stuffed Riak clusters full of HTTP requests, built a large scale fuzzing farm for Windows desktop software, language runtimes, linkers, kernel modules, iPhone apps, and chipset fuzzers.

* Unlimited free books. You get an Amazon account. You see a book, you buy the book, it's yours. Write your name on it, take it home.

* Market comp, bonuses for speaking at conferences, medical, dental, 401k

Interested? We wrote down everything we could think of about our hiring process at http://www.matasano.com/careers. Our contact information is there. YOU CANNOT WASTE OUR TIME. We're happy just to talk to you about our field.

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Notes:

* This is way longer than I'd write a job post, but in the same word count ballpark as the "bulleted list" example from Jamie's post. (I also wrote it extemporaneously so give me a break on grammar and clarity).

* There are bullets but none of them are intended to screen candidates. It's my job to screen, the bullet's job is to invite.

* There are buzzwords but, like I think every good tech job post, the script is flipped: I'm selling with them, not using them to exclude people with a regex on their resume.

* "You cannot waste our time". #1 thing that freaks me out about our job ads: are people reading them and thinking "These guys won't think I'm qualified for the role so why bother applying". Some of our best hires had no previous professional track record in our field.

* Tech-forward: we're recruiting gifted low-level developers, so we're not talking about changing the world or revolutionizing our industry or the exhilaration of working in a fast-paced startup environment. We're talking (I hope!) about awesome technical challenges.

* Yes, I am totally cheating by sneaking a job ad into an HN comment. On the other hand: HN is one of our top recruiting vectors, and we're bigger than most YC companies, so I think I might have some actionable intel on how to recruit from HN. :)

I took a look at your startup, Lookcraft. As a guy who likes fashion, it looked interesting.

But to be honest, I'm tired of having to register for these types of sites in order to use/try them upon the first encounter.

Most real-life and online retail experiences do not work this way.

If I had to register with Nike.com in order to see its shoes, I'd shop somewhere else; especially so if I had to do it in-store. (And that's an established brand. Though, perhaps I'm in the minority.)

I suggest you just let people see what you're offering first. Afterall, what you want is sales. But because of my initial experience with/reaction to your site, it's unlikely I'll ever buy something from you.

I know you want to track the number of users, have loyal customers, etc. But let me see the thing first. Let me easily buy something first.

Then, ask if I'd like to register.

Don't force me to, especially not before I've had the chance to say "hello" for the first time.

When I see an email registration form before an actual product, the first thing I think of is: I'm going to get a lot of spam.

I'm sure you wouldn't send that type of stuff to me. But many others have (and continue to do so), so I immediately think back button when I see it.

My $0.02 - the trick is to capture the attention with a blurb at the beginning about the grander vision, give a few high-level bullets to orient / qualify further reading, and then go nuts with the wall 'o words.

I also like when some of the marketing jargon is left out and it reads like a plain english description of what your company is trying to do. Don't pitch me with buzz words. Just describe the potential opportunity and the challenges that might appeal to me.