Everyone knows the first step to acquiring quality talent, regardless of your recruiting process, starts with a quality job post. There is an art to creating a compelling job post that captures the attention of top technical talent while including a complete (and accurate) explanation of the role. You don’t want to be responsible for a tweet from a potential candidate like this one:
Yikes.
The technology market has an acutely competitive hiring landscape. The quality of your job post determines how you’ll stand out from every other Silicon Valley startup looking for the next top software professional. If you’re like our clients, you dream about getting a leg up on the competition by skipping the job post-composition and going straight to selecting candidates.
At Gun.io, we’ve posted hundreds of jobs and made a few mistakes along the way. There’s no better way to learn than from others’ technical recruiting mistakes — rather than your own. Here’s what we learned from some shockingly real technical job post fails:
1. Only include relevant role requirements
Be sure to narrow your list of requirements to only the necessary attributes and technical ability relevant to the role. We’re pretty sure your candidate’s poetry preference won’t help you ship faster.
2. Be reasonable with the benefits you offer
Yes, this was a real job post. Yes, there are so many things wrong with this. While it’s important to include the benefits you offer your employees, try to steer clear of any that scream, “toxic work environment”.
3. Location is not compensation
There is a difference between offering benefits, and offering benefits in place of compensation. You don’t need to list the exact salary for the role, but you certainly can’t use your prime office real estate as payment for a senior Vue developer.
4. Include a compelling job title
This job title is compelling…for all the wrong reasons. We dig the transparency but be sure to include more information about the role, company, industry, or specialized tech skills needed to grab the attention of qualified candidates.
5. Build rapport with potential candidates
In our experience, engineers are most drawn to the purpose of a role. What exciting new development opportunities are awaiting potential candidates at your company? Describing the purpose of your role as something “we’re too busy to do” is a fast track to recruitment failure.
