Why write about job ads? This is blog for software developers, not HR and marketing. Well, can you really expect HR to find you good developers without your help? Yes you, the freak with the keyboard.
My company wanted to hire more talented programmers and the question was how to do this within limited time and budget? There are many companies fighting for good programmers, how can we step out?
I gave it a thought, what I can do to change this in our favor and I concluded that I should rewrite our old generic corporate developer job ad to something awesome. So I did it and we had pretty good result. You can see new job ad here.
Read on to see what were my guiding principles.
What’s wrong with old ad?
The ad is generic and boring. It doesn’t distinguish us from any other company.
Section describing candidate responsibilities should go without saying because it describes almost any dev job and still you have no idea what you would be working on if you get the job.
We ask for RequireJS experience. Really!? I can teach it to good dev in 1 day. I think you should rarely insist on experience in some technology if that is something that can be learnt very quickly.
How to be better?
Here are my guiding principles for writing new ad:
- It should be written by dev for dev.
- It should state all the things I like about my job. Yes coffee and parking are important to me, they make every morning start a little nicer. Why not share it with others.
- It should mention all the things we built and are proud of. Programmers love challenges and project where they can learn new stuff. If you have them, than brag you fool!
- No bullshit and empty talk. Marketing lead, friendly work environment, bla bla… say something concrete and interesting.
- It should be funny. Why the hell not! We try to have fun at work every day and we are very proud of our work atmosphere. Why be boring when it comes to a job ad?
- It should be in native language.
How did it go?
It went great! We had way more job candidates than normal. Usually we hire 1 good programmer after we put out an ad. This time we hired 3. Few candidates said that they applied only because they liked the unusual ad. We got CV’s and emails from candidates that were personalized to match humor from our ad.
All of this because of little honesty and humor. Don’t be boring!
