How to write a job description
Easy exercise for writing the right job description
The Creation
This is one of my favorite exercises for undertaking problems like this. If you don’t have a team to bounce the ideas off of grab a buddy to help you out:
Bring everyone together and give them a pad of sticky notes. For 2–5 minutes have them write down everything that they believe embodies what the positions job requirements should look like.
At the end of the time, post them all on the wall with similar ideas overlapping.
Your top 3–5 piles will define the positions activities and expectations, and what you are looking for in new candidates.
We encourage you to not go higher than five per section as applicants will start getting lost and stop reading them.
As an example here is what we did for our CTO position:
Activities
- Build new features to drive user engagement and success
- Write tests to automate testing environments
- Manage deployment and operations
- Ensure that technical work done by the team is scalable, extensible, and high-quality
- Facilitate technical hiring as needed, as well as refer technical talent
Expectations
- 5+ years of experience in professional software development
- Has managed developers, and built a technical team
- An understanding of deployment, operations, and infrastructure
- Experience deploying and running a production web application with substantial amounts of users
- Familiar with and used to adhering to industry best practices (testing, version control, documentation, SSL, etc.)
Culture
- Efficient: Delivers promises on time without delays
- Honest & Integrity: Will never do anything they believe to against the will of the company or user and will bring up and discuss any issue they believe is near the gray area.
- Disciplined: Willing to put in the extra hours necessary to make sure all expectations are met.
- Intelligent: Needs to be able to visualize challenges before they occur and find solutions
- High Emotional Intelligence: Needs to be able to discuss and be upfront about any possible conflict they envision. Needs to be able to stay calm under intense deadlines.
Lucas is the founder of Spark xyz, platform management software for incubators, accelerators, Angel groups, and VC’s.
