"A positive self starter who needs minimum oversight."
"Proactive and demonstrates sound judgment in managing multiple tasks and requests"
"Growth potential."
The above are to job descriptions as "excellent communication skills" are to resumes. They're essentially space fillers, claims based on having nothing else to say, and they don't actually add anything of real evaluative utility. If you want to attract relevant, qualified candidates, you need to have detailed job descriptions devoid of fluff. Let's go through a few ways to optimize your job descriptions and attract only the candidates you want.
Trimming the Fat
Your first step should be to go through your job descriptions and eliminate the non-essential. Of everything in your description, ask yourself the following questions:
- Does it illuminate the role?
- Is it an obvious office-related skill (effective verbal and written communication)?
- Can the reader qualify themselves by reading this?
The point here is to have lean lists of necessary skills that paint a clear, non-romanticized picture of the role as well as of the ideal candidate. You can get as flowery with your job descriptions you want, but the longer and less precise they are, the more likely you'll get irrelevant applicants, or none at all.
People Are Not a List of Bullet Points
Even if you succeed in the above with commendable aplomb and clarity, it's important to remember that people still do not exist in the cookie cutter shape of your job description. The ideal here is to attract relevant people, but at the same time be ready to abandon the bullets and know when you've got an incredibly bright, hard worker in the pipeline who can succeed despite not checking every single box. If you fill jobs retroactively, fitting people to roles rather than the other way around, you're condemning your future teammates never to grow beyond that prescripted set of responsibilities. While there will always be a need for specialists, realize that you're not trying to hire a calculating robot that is purpose built for the role. Instead you have to find someone who can grow, adapt, and produce at a high rate when they run in to the problems you didn't think up when you were writing your job posts.
Below is an example of Entelo's description for a Full-Stack Engineer:
Entelo is looking for strong generalist developers, capable of working on diverse aspects of our web application. On a given day you may be modeling data, building APIs, working on server-side templates, or writing client-side javascript. We create Web Applications written in Ruby on Rails verified with RSpec. We use Scala and Ruby to collect data and MySQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Redis to process it. We have great products and enthusiastic customers and are growing the team so we can continue to innovate.
Notice in the second sentence, how we describe with some detail what day-to-day tasks look like in this position. Anyone can pitch a list of skills and a vision for the company, but that doesn't tell your candidates what their life at the company will look like 8 months down the road at 11AM on a Tuesday. In the third sentence, we go on to give a list of some of the technologies we utilize, so the reader can decide for themselves if they have enough relevant experience for this role to make sense for them.
This job description is the result of our Head of Talent sitting down with our Vice President of Engineering and taking the time to learn what day-to-day life is like in this role. The importance of the hiring manager's involvement at this stage cannot be understated. If you're going to attract the most relevant top talent, you need to be speaking their language without any hint of an accent.
What are some examples of successes you've had with writing job descriptions? Leave a comment or tweet @EnteloRob!
