Help Wanted — on Writing Job Descriptions | Hacker News Reader

Help Wanted — on Writing Job Descriptions

online.wsj.com

24 pointsesharef10 comments

The biggest problem is that job descriptions sound like they were written by HR. Sometimes there are numerous qualifications listed which are unnecessary for the position.

A good suggestion from the article was to have 2 versions of a job description - a longer one for performance evaluation and a shorter one for job postings. It appears that most companies only have one version - the longer, tedious version with the laundry list of Superman "requirements".

It's even worse when they are written by recruiters who don't consult requirement details with the target company and start inventing their own. I've recently seen ads for the same position in the same company in my city (you just could tell) with different frameworks listed as required experience.

Plug: If you want help writing a better job description, we're one of the companies quoted in the article and can help you (HireArt). We do it for free if you post a job on our site. It's pretty crazy how much of a difference it can actually make. If you do it yourself, my biggest advice is: make it memorable. Funny, sweet, crazy, whatever...but make it something people think of even after they close the browser window. www.hireart.com

I have to agree with the comment from johnjlocke. Also, many job descriptions focus too much on providing a laundry list of requirements and don't touch on what the role can mean for the candidate (how they can help the company achieve its larger goals and how it can help the right candidate do challenging things they love). Plug: We have a guide on our site gleaned from experience helping to recruit and hire tech roles for our portfolio companies: http://labs.openviewpartners.com/boring-job-descriptions/

Also, here's a list of three examples of great job descriptions from TLNT you can check out: http://www.tlnt.com/2012/08/02/three-awesome-examples-of-gre...

Two of those three examples are horrendous. The second sounds like it's trying too hard to sound "hip" while the third makes applicants complete a tedious puzzle to apply. Using programming puzzles at the interview is bad enough. Making candidates jump through all those hoops just to apply is insulting.

You need a lot of "street cred" to use a puzzle in a job application. Google. Dropbox. Facebook. Maybe Twilio. Anybody else? immediately skip on to next one

Joblint (https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint) points out "sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails" in job descriptions. Pretty clever.

New Project: Scrape job boards to run through joblint.

I saw some job postings on HN earlier that didn't talk about what the company does. This is key!

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