How not to advertise for a job in London | Hacker News Reader

How not to advertise for a job in London

programmingisterrible.com

81 pointsvonmoltke74 comments

Whether it's illegal or not, I sort of wish more employers would just advertise like this anyway - just tell me you're really only interested in a 23 year old, so I can avoid wasting both our time. Theoretically, the market will reward them with ... whatever comes of having a bunch of 23 year olds running mission-critical aspects of your business. Might be massive success, might be failure, but let them get on with it.

Yes the amount of people that want to interview me is high in Barcelona. The amount of people that want to pay for my level of experience is low (and the wages aren't especially high here). Save us both the time and tell me in advance what you are willing to pay.

Setting experience requirements (high and low) is legal. Flat out stating an age isn't, in both the US and the UK.

Setting a maximum experience requirement isn't legal in the US because it has a disparate impact on older applicants.

True, it could be a cultural thing. His ad is more or less legal in China. Other preferences he could have added include height and weight requirement.

Yeah, I don't mind. But they're either asking for a freaking genius or a liar, and since they're asking for a bunch of stuff that isn't really pertinent I'm willing to bet they pay like crap too. They'll get the liar and they'll probably deserve it.

Theoretically, they'll get the liars, and they'll suffer s a business for that. In practice, I've seen this happen, but everyone else suffers too, and it's a long drawn out process for the incompetence to surface, and often brings down others too.

This just in, I found one of the employees they hired using this incredible job posting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Kboormk3Y

And when the year olds ends up in court/tribuneral in front of an experienced lawyer who will rip him or her to shreds.

Industrial Tribunerals (labor courts) are not nice places trust me on this i know an EX GC who specialized in this area.

This is either really good satire or really depressing.

It's like every HR buzzword has been shoved into a single requirements doc, and then some bizarre ones added for good measure (it's a bonus if you like to wear headphones apparently?)

I'm going to print this out and stick it on my wall - no matter how bad my professional life gets, I will be reminded at least I don't work here.

This was discussed in slack and as far as we can tell, it's legit. His responses were to the similar effect, he did soften it saying he would give bonus points to the applicants who meets the 'preferences'(!). That was until his apology of course.

Under "common behaviours of our ideal candidate" in the HR doc posted:

> 8. Just a nice dude

It seems obvious to me that this is outright illegal gender discrimination, am I wrong?

"Dude" doesn't necessarily imply male, but it is strongly slanted that way. I'm not sure if it would hold up as discrimination.

Yeah, I always see this sort of comment and worry that I'm the only person using guys/dude/folks as a catch-all.

Quickly Googling seems to indicate that it's not set in stone, at least.

It's something to be aware of and to try to avoid. It may be casually acceptable, but consider it from a female candidates point of view. Having been frequently confronted with exclusionary language the assumption is likely to be that this usage does imply male-only. I'm not saying you or anyone implies that, but it's good to be aware of so you can avoid unintended discrimination. It takes almost no effort to modify these word choices to be inclusive.

It typically applies only to males, and historically has only referred to males. If I were a female thinking about applying for this job, I would certainly be taken aback by it.

While you might refer to a mixed-gendered group as "dudes" it seems odd to refer to a single female as a "dude"

My wife and her female cousin-in-law do it to each other all the time.

That said, I agree it's not appropriate for a job req and understand why it turns women off from applying.

While it might not hold up as being against the law, it likely would deter many females from applying.

Referring to women as "females" probably won't help, either

Agreed.

You're not wrong at all. Furthermore:

> 2. Under 30 years old

Is obviously age discrimination as well. Unlike some people, I'm under no illusions that tech is non-discriminatory, but it's still surprising and disappointing to see it stated so plainly on a job description.

These people are idiots for leaving this document online now that they've been caught. I don't know the specifics of UK labour laws, but in the US its mere existence would be grounds for a lawsuit.

They only need "Fast and accurate proficiency" in being under 30 years old ;) (so someone who just turned 30 is probably best, having the 30 years experience with being under 30)

"The Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful to discriminate against employees, job seekers and trainees because of their age." [1]

[1] http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1841

Wait, UK only adopted this in 2010? Sorry, I am surprised by that

Not necessarily. That Act might be an update to a previously-existing one that also forbade gender discrimination.

The 2010 Act just merges the laws from the 1970s (equal pay, race relations, etc) into a single law. It was an exercise in tidying up the statute books.

This is correct, age discrimination was the most recent addition to the anti-discrimination laws.

The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations [1] made age discrimination illegal beginning in 2006. Before that it was not illegal. The 2010 act, among other things, extended protection for age discrimination to other people such as prospective employees.

I'm British, and the fact that we only got around to this in 2006 seems to me to be fairly shameful.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Equality_(Age)_Regul...

well, we've got plenty of shameful things in the US that we haven't gotten around to fixing, so no worries

Is a demand for an academic reference letter obvious age discrimination also? I'm old enough that I'm pretty sure some of my profs are dead by now. I suppose a seance could be arranged.

Trying to obtain "testimonials of previous customers" would almost certainly get me fired and sounds like a major breach of professional etiquette but then again this is a different culture, maybe that kind of thing is normal over there. Along with providing dumps of my social media presence.

Not to trash talk the concept of the startup excessively, but why do they need a guy with 20+ years of experience and a full service laundry list to do what little they're trying to do, and unless I was the dumbest 20+ year veteran out there its not really possible to summarize my entire life experience in a 30 second video, at least to any useful to them extent. Slap a video on youtube and send em a link doesn't take a 20 year industry veteran although I could do it if I needed to pay the mortgage. Also, I've seen longer gravestone epitaphs than whats provided.

On the bright side they didn't ask for sexual orientation, marital status, religious beliefs, or demand an interpretive dance portraying the quicksort algorithm, although who knows what goes on at the interview.

So they're looking for someone simultaneously deeper than the Marianas Trench and shallower than a rain puddle. Good luck with that.

> On the bright side they didn't ask for sexual orientation, marital status, religious beliefs, or demand an interpretive dance portraying the quick sort algorithm, although who knows what goes on at the interview.

Hah, well-put. Anyone know what the apology and the tweet before it was? Both links are dead now.

The youth obsession in tech is strange. I understand a culture fit but the best programmers I know are 40+, they just had the drive to stay up on trends and experience that goes back miles.

The youth obsession in tech is strange.

Young employees are much easier to overwork and underpay. Some 20-somethings even throw years of their personal lives away when the right carrot is dangled in their face.

Yeah you can't ask that.

When you read the rest of the document it's clear the 'job definition' has been done by someone whose not a HR professional. It's probably a tech or developer whose inexperienced. The only thing I'll say in defense of it is that this isn't as unusual as you might expect - even if they don't write it a lot of people probably use heuristics like this, unfortunately!

> by someone whose not a HR professional

No need to require HR skills when basic English proficiency is lacking. What does "work in a team of all current developers" even means? Don't get me started on "Conscientious and committed to a certain task where they decided to commit themselves", that's positively Shakespearian. Was this written by a real person using Google Translate, or by a bot?

Oh, and what the hell is a "MagicPitch"?

Dude can sometimes be used to refer to people of both genders. Although in a professional job posting, there are dozens of words that would be more explicitly gender-neutral and a better choice.

If you were as confused by the "Magic Pitch" requirement as I was, here is an explanation from the startup itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XqYXP1Azsk&t=1m18s

Essentially, they want candidates to pitch to employers using a short video.

The idea of candidate videos has been floated about since before YouTube. I remember discussing it with a large job board owner over 10 years ago, and several times since, and there's always been a consensus that no real company would touch it with a 10 foot pole, mainly because seeing the candidate means you know their age, race and gender, all protected employment categories. It's a complete non-starter, and the founder is being really naive for his failure to look around and realize that if no one is doing something so painfully obvious and easy to implement, the market has spoken.

For what it's worth, attaching a photo to your resume, while taboo in the English speaking world, is acceptable in some European countries (Italy, Germany, France) and even preferred in some Asian countries. Personally, I hope this practice dies out, because of all the discrimination it inevitably leads to. I recall a large study that showed that attractive women (surprise) and unattractive men received significantly fewer callbacks compared to unattractive women/attractive men and/or when their photo was added to their otherwise identical resume.

Is that really the reason why?

I'm pretty sure you would get somebody's age, race and gender just by reading their resume/CV, which most job boards allow potential hiring companies to peruse.

The difference is how easy it will be for a candidate to make the claim that you must have known about what protected classes they belong to when you discarded them as a candidate.

If all you have is the CV, possibly anonymised, you can feign ignorance or genuinely be ignorant of the candidates age, race and gender in a way that will be absolutely impossible to pull off if you've seen them on video.

...aaaannd there goes the "faith in humanity"-budget for the day. There can't be many people applying to such job offers, right?

(Also, video-pitch for a job as a backend developer? What's the logic behind that except "let's see through how many hoops they'll jump")

I checked it out the other day, and his whole start-up was based on this 30-second video "magic-pitch" thing, which is why they had it for their own candidates, I guess.

So along the lines of "use our product for your application"? That would make some resemblance of sense...

If you require people to jump through hoops for a job, only people who have time to jump through them will apply.

@xiangyu_wu deleted his twitter account and Topsy doesn't seem to have the incriminating tweets, any other archive?

I managed to see his tweets, where he apologised for his job-posting, by googling for his twittername and looking it up at google cache.

Thanks, so his last tweet before nuking his account was:

"Apologies for my discriminative job advert. It was totally wrong. Going forwards, we’re adopting a more ethical hiring procedure."

He seem to have nuked his linkedin account and similar such accounts as well.

This doesn't make a lot of sense, assuming Xiangyu Wu is his actual name.

Moreover while I can understand deleting a Twitter account after a Tweetstorm, deleting your professional Linked In profile seems pointless at best, unless I am missing something.

I can't find the original anywhere. Must have deleted it before Google Cached.

Yo I actually know the dude from school...feel like I owe him a bit of a defense after his minute of twitter infamy :) I'd understand the anger if this were, like, a Goldman Sachs-calibre company practicing age-based discrimination, but in this case there's no they, there's literally just a guy plus some coder friends of his, getting a bit excited about startup plans.

The dude's 23 (plus or minus) himself, and decidedly not versed in HR laws - I could imagine the words "discrimination" (...or "political correctness"...or maybe "self-awareness") didn't even enter his mind while he typed away at his dream candidate wish list. Sure it's hilarious, but maybe cut him some slack re: sinister intentions. I don't think it's too pleasant waking up and getting a hundred angry retweets for something like this.

I agree that Hanlon's Razor should be applied here, and yes, this twitterstorm should know its limits (see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw... and http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spiraled...)

However, I'd like to take you up on two points:

> I'd understand the anger if this were, like, a Goldman Sachs-calibre company practicing age-based discrimination

Are you claiming that small companies should be free to discriminate against protected characteristics with impunity, and that only large companies should be held to account for bad behaviour? Where do you draw the line?

> decidedly not versed in HR laws

As far as I can see, Career Harbour claims to be a revolutionary recruitment company, xiangyu_wu claims to be its founder and CEO.

In order to make those claims, one must have at least a cursory knowledge of the law and customs pertaining to recruitment. "Know the rules well so that you can break them effectively"

Although I can't back this up with quotes now, as the site has disappeared, I think I read that they wanted to "disrupt" recruitment and were targeting the milkround market, by allowing applicants to apply to all the big names with just one form. They may not be a Big Company themselves, but they are pitching themselves as the gateway to them. Were I to apply to PWC or KPMG or whoever through them (with a "magicpitch" video), I wouldn't be surprised to find that they'd not even sent it on, due to the shortage and greyness of my hair and colour of my skin.

Also, (again, I can't back it up, because his own tweets have vanished) it looks like some of the ire comes not just from the awful ad itself, but from his attempt to defend it (e.g. https://twitter.com/digitalmaverick/status/57606722316234752...). That said, in his defence, he has "had a change of heart", which may mean that he is repentant.

Anyway, if, as he wishes his employees to be, he is a "nice dude" who "celebrates failure" and can "accept difficult challenges as opportunity for growth" and "deal with setbacks and failure on a continuous basis", this event will be bread-and-butter for him.

>> Enters into a state of Flow, where when the candidate is coding a long time they are wired in and cannot easily get distracted

Haha, TBH almost every programmer I know under 30 years old is distracted every 90 seconds by a) a tweet, b) a text, c) a notification, or d) an email. Wait, actually that's all of us, under 30 or not.

But you have control over when you are responding to said distraction, so it won't necessarily get you out of the zone.

I suppose, to an extent, but I think all the notifications and events are more successful than not in pulling people's attention away from what they are doing. At least that is my observation.

Depends on how you are wired. I can't not react to external stimuli, and being in an environment with a lot of stimuli I can't control raises my stress level pretty quickly.

i allow myself to be impacted by this too much, but I would still say we do have control, as we choose to allow ourselves to be exposed to the stimuli, right? the provided examples above a-d can all be controlled by not having your phone in front of you, and closing non-coding applications.

desk drive-bys and kitchen cake on the other hand, are much less likely for me to resist

https://www.facebook.com/careerharbour

"We introduced our first professionally designed CV template. You may purchase it at john@careerharbour.co.uk You get a free preview."

(How do you purchase something at an e-mail address ?)

http://www.careerharbour.co.uk/ is down.

Profile on linkedin seems to have disappeared.

Facebook has been silent since the beginning of March (after an avalanche of posts since the beginning of the year).

Smells like a failed/failing startup...

Does someone know more ? Didn't really care much (I just wanted to know what kind of company they were) but now I'm curious.

Context: This ad first appeared in a slack channel and straightaway people called him out and why it's wrong. Someone decided to call him out on twitter instead. Twitterstorm.

It's not clear to me, was this ad placed through Career Harbour or by Career Harbour? Their site is down at the moment, but they appear to be an HR-type of company.

Either way, it's bad news, since they either placed a blatantly discriminatory ad themselves or they failed to warn a client that such ads are illegal in the UK (pretty big failure for a career services company).

I would not be shocked if the ad is some internal document they use as an illustration of what not to put in job ads.

Then they can have a discussion around it. This item is illegal. This item is going to put off many candidates. This item is unclear. And so on.

edit: From other comments about people from the company nuking their online presence, maybe it was real. Huh.

The ideal candidate displays and implements "pushing forward motions". They... wave their hands in the air?

This is a wind up, surely!

Fav part:

"b. come to the office every time a line of code is written."

Not sure how you would get anything done at all, if you had to run to the office every single time you hit the return key.

no of course one proposes or moves a "motion" :-)

When I initially saw the ad, I thought it was satire. Didn't think it could be real.

There are a bunch of things about this document that are not legal in England. Age, sex, and long working hours are all things theycan be done for.

Once a recruiter asked me if I had 10 years of experience in a specific technology which is there for less than 5 years...I hung up the phone...

I had a recruiter turn me down for a job interview as I didn't have experience with 'Marcos' on my CV. I think he meant Macros, but I was too busy laughing to find out.

Surely that can't be for real. I saw it a few days ago and immediately thought it was a parody... but...

They forget to add:

"Well qualified candidates will have a brilliant, well-defined business plan for a start-up idea that does not suck, which you will sign over to us in order to have the privilege of interviewing for this junior position."

Setting aside its illegality, what strikes me here is how unintentionally hilarious this job posting is. I'm laughing just thinking about someone earnestly creating this, and maybe even someone else approving it for publication.

Out of curiosity, are these discrimination laws hard and fast in in the UK? At least, in the U.S., most of these laws explicitly only affect a company above a certain number of employees.

They apply whether you have 1 employee or 50,000.

Individual ones do collective ones consultation of redundancy and so on do have a minimum size.

Though some elements of the Tory party and Ukip want to do away with all those laws

Long Term Goals:

1. Self-actualisation

2. Starting their own company

3. Change the world

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