Why Companies Write Terrible Job Posts | Hacker News Reader

Why Companies Write Terrible Job Posts

alyaabbott.wordpress.com

30 pointsalya20 comments

Coming from a position of reviewing thousands of resumes in the past few years, and acting as the hiring manager dozens of folks from junior/fresh grad to senior spots, I have a different take entirely.

Especially in large orgs, that crappy ad might be a way of discouraging external applicants, because an internal person is already wanted, but there are 'rules' and 'policies' to be followed about advertising positions. This is especially true around the Federal Govt and it's contracting retinue.

Most of the crappy job ads I've been on the hiring side of were simply because the technical team is too busy to give it much attention, so the HR folks get to write things or pick from other ads already written that can be 'tweaked', which results in gibberish.

In many big orgs, good hires are RARELY going to be random off the street folks (i.e. 'getting them to apply' is a waste of time), and will almost always be referrals. Taking random folks off the street is taking your team's success into your own hands in a very, very unnerving way. Even a modicum of 'yeah I know X, he isn't a total psychopath' is infinitely easier to swallow than a piece of paper and an interview.

So, basically, the ad that goes out in job listings is a waste of your time in the end, statistically speaking, and time is something you don't have much of to begin with, so it gets minimal attention from those who could/should know better.

Now, if that minimal attention leads to really low non-referral stats, or vice versa, I wouldn't begin to know...

I disagree with the author.

This is the way I perceive the differences between the 2 job posts...

The Yelp ad text excerpt the author singled out as good:

>A place where, “They banter about Bandits, know their way down a Gradient, and aren’t too Naïve to kick back in our Bay(es) Area offices,” sounds quite a bit more fun.

It may sound like more fun but to me, it's just a sentence with puns on math terms. There's no content there. It's like they're trying too hard and it gives off the vibe of used car salesmen.

Compare that to the "boring" ad:

>Projects involve feature extraction from multi-source data; pattern recognition and behavior analysis; information-theoretic analysis of machine-aided decision effectiveness; semi-automated sensor cueing and resource optimization; modeling and simulation of surveillance and reconnaissance networks; design, implementation and analysis of laboratory and field experiments. The successful candidate will demonstrate an understanding of the interplay between physics-based signal and image analysis and text summarization and interpretation analysis.

Yes, it's a clinical and dry list but it actually has more useful concrete information than a bunch of puns.

I don't need (bad) comedy. Just tell me in plain terms what the project is about.

As a third example, it's interesting to look at a company that has no problem attracting eager applicants such as Apple Inc.

Their main recruiting page does have fluff verbiage: https://www.apple.com/jobs/us/

But once you drill into the actual job postings, they use plain clinical descriptions.

https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?jobFunction=SFWEG

It's understandable that some companies do want to write playful job descriptions but sometimes it can backfire. The company is then perceived as all sizzle and no steak, or form over function, etc. A lot of failed companies in the dot com bust wrote playful job descriptions like that.

The advantage that Apple has is that they are already a household brand that is associated with cool so they don't have to sell their culture very much, people already want to work there.

On the other hand an unknown company has to get it's culture across in the job description and language paints a picture. If you are using very clinical language that is going to colour expectations of what that company is like to work for, even though your intention is the opposite. The picture you are painting with uninspired language is likely to be one of cubicles and TPS reports.

There is probably a happy medium here, a way to make the job sound exciting to most demographics whilst still being information dense but it requires strong language skills and domain knowledge which many people writing job postings do not necessarily have.

Job postings communicate, implicitly and/or explicitly, information about the job and the company both. The companies that do this best recognize this mixed goal of advertisement and information source. The first posting accomplished the latter, and the second the former. If one doesn't appreciate the comedy then perhaps they are not the kind of cultural fit that the company seeks. That matters too, particularly for length of tenure.

Apple doesn't have to play by the same rules though. They are a known-quantity, and you'll probably not see anything in the job posting that dramatically impacts your perception of the company as a whole.

Statement of Credibility: Worked at CareerBuilder for several years doing much analysis on posting and job seeker behavior, and wrote a dissertation on factors that *induce responses to job postings.

The Yelp ad makes me physically ill, but the military ad 1) fills me with curiosity, and 2) gives me exactly enough information for me to figure out whether I'm qualified for it. I'm astounded that 'classic' manages that feat by being detailed and clear without even mentioning a single software package.

Am I abnormal?

edit: if when I work at Yelp, I can expect people to talk to me in the same way as that job posting, I'm definitely out. Or rather, I won't 'saddle up' and 'kick back' with them by getting 'on board' their data-chewing 'playground.' I've rarely seen metaphors so mixed:)

See, I can't help but find the latter of those two insufferable. Yes, the former sounds stuffy and boring, but the latter one actively makes me cringe and think of overly enthusiastic Bennigans-esque managers who really want to be my "friend" but without any of that "human empathy" stuff when the chips are down.

As they say, one person's trash is another's... I'm generally turned off from job posts with long run on sentences and adjectives that make it read more like the plaquette in an art gallery than job description. In a similar manner spare me the platitudes about how fun the office is, how every tuesday is fresh fruit day, how there is free coffee and a ping pong table. The people you really want to work for you are the one's that already went through the "work is a place to make friends and meet people" phase and want their work to just be a professional and challenging. Work is not just the next guided life-stage after the cocoon of college. but, that is just my opinion and I know that for many a funny post and list of perks are what they want. Just know that one method does not fit all.

It depends. I have worked in various places. Some were very sociable, other everyone went straight home to families. If I was considering a job in a new location, I think I would definitely factor in a "fun sounding" environment.

The best workplaces are those where you can be both sociable or straight to home and the choice does not impact your career.

I agreed with your comment until my mind went through the places I have worked. One employer was quite in the middle, mainly go home to families, but with enough trips to the pub and social activities to make it interesting. Unfortunately the work environment was awful. Aggressive management style. Code quality was pretty much ignored. Really high turnover, despite working with some pretty decent people.

I disagree that dry ads are terrible. Terrible ads don't communicate the requirements, skills, and content of the position. Dry ads just indicate a bureaucratic work environment. That's an important signal to send.

For example, If you can't live without a foosball table, and will get agitated or angry with change management requiring paperwork before every push to production, then you wouldn't be a good fit with us, and I wouldn't want to make my job ad flowery and "fun" and send the wrong signal. It would be a waste of candidates time and my own.

> consider the objective: getting qualified candidates to apply.

I don't think this is always the case--there are hiring practices (visas, company policies, etc) that mean the listing is often for show. In these cases the job post is tailored so that only one person in the world could meet the qualifications.

Didn't see this mentioned in the blog post, but you can't rule out that the postings are intentionally bad. If the hiring firm wants to establish there are no qualified local candidates before hiring an international candidate, a well written job posting is simultaneously wasted effort, and potentially counterproductive to their aims. Oracle, for example, is in the [top 15](http://www.salar.ly/statistics) work visa applicants between 2009-2013.

From my experience, large corporations have standardized job roles (e.g. SE5) and these have descriptions attached to them, describing the role in the numbing HR verbage shown in the post. This text is used everywhere from hiring, all the way to assessing your performance. Much like legal texts, the meaning is precise in the hands of HR but for anyone else appears stuffy and verbose.

Unfortunately, the hiring manager often has to use this prescribed text and if they are lucky they may have a paragraph added on to describe what the real role entails.

Absolutely. There are edge cases where the firm doesn't want applicants, and plenty more cases where using appropriate jargon attracts only the qualified job seekers.

There are also plenty of corporations who consistently advertise positions with abominable phrases like "reliably exceed assigned activity and revenue quota within designated territory" or "leverage relationships across cross-functional multinational teams within a matrix structure" or "ensure developments are communicated appropriately to the line manager and relevant stakeholders through relevant channels" because corporate bullet points on expectations for new staff members weren't written with the idea of attracting them. (And in some cases were written to ensure a sufficiently large number of possible grounds for not retaining hires that didn't appear to be working out.)

The actual, boring reason job posts are terrible: boring, terrible managers write the requirements and they get copied+pasted verbatim to the website.There is no review, there is no toying with language to hook a potential. They're already going to get 1,000 resumes whether it's a sexy ad or not. They just churn out a blurb and post it.

If you see it on a jobs board, the headhunter probably got a three-sentence description and had to pad it to sound more detailed. Often headhunters are so stupid that they copy+paste the job description to their spam lists. I've gotten e-mails (as a 'potential recruit') that detail to the headhunter how to edit the job post for different sites before sending it.

I find the first job ad better. First of all, they work with military, so if you are formal language off-put you that much, you are not good fit. Second, I know immediately that I'm not qualified.

The second one provides very little useful information and it is all in last two sentences. I will write algorithms and they are expected to be scalable. I have no idea whether I am qualified. Maybe yes, maybe not. The rest of it just sounds like someone trying to be cool too hard. They can be cool workplace, or maybe just am intolerant workplace that kick your posterior if you have different preconceived ideas then them.

<rant>Why do people use pictures for purely textual information?</rant>

I might add to the "how" that these sorts of listings oftentimes end up in a system that allows for search. Maybe Monster, maybe just Google. A well-written job posting might cull certain phrases that could perform well in a search.

Its all in the job market. In a buyers market (unemployment high) then you can make job hunters jump through hoops; you can repel many applicants and still have people lined up.

A while ago, someone wrote a post comparing a private sector job ad to a government job ad, highlighting the bureaucratic language used.

I can't find it.

Does anyone else have that bookmarked?

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