So We Might Have Killed the Job Description | Hacker News Reader

So We Might Have Killed the Job Description

blog.workshape.io

21 pointsheelhook18 comments

> After several days, the CTO / Hiring manager gives up on writing the job description, copies something

What kind of terrible CTO is that? If you don't know how to describe the tasks and requirements of a job such that a person qualified to take it will understand what the job will be, then you have two options:

1. If your org is big enough, delegate to the team leads closer to the matter, better yet: To the actual people the new hire will be working with.

2. If your org is small: Resign, you're unqualified for your position.

Don't try to fix hiring by ignoring the actual problem and try to jam in a terrible hacky workaround. The only real fix is to be honest about the job.

@lobster_johnson: Fair enough, that would be a valid use.

@workshape: Oh hi, have you come with the downvotes after deleting the first submission on which i made this comment? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9143891 )

Not sure why you're getting down voted like this...

EDIT: It doesn't appear that bad anymore, but as soon as this comment was posted it got down voted pretty bad. Something fishy going on...

I don't disagree with your first sentence, but this looks better than a hacky workaround. One of the main problems of finding people is reading through candidates' lists of qualifications and interests. By having a set of quantified metrics I see this being useful in being able to sort applicants by something like K-nn distance.

But this about creating the job description, not reading CVs. There are already lots of apps designed to parse CVs and sort them based on keyword relevance.

I didn't really see the point of this tool. From what I can tell, you put in a bunch of metrics and the app tells you what the job title and description are. Surely if you're creating a position in your company, you must know what it's for?

This sounds over complicated and the CTO sounds horrible.

The dev team hiring the engineers should gather together and write some specs. The leader should post the job online and then the team should deliberate on each candidate.

Everything else sounds like a waste of time.

CTO of Workshape.io here. My co-founder Hung was painting a rather extreme picture, but the picture he does paint is a reasonable portrayal of a possible reality.

Not all CTOs are good at hiring/writing an effective job description (what is an effective job description?). And it does stand to reason, like with many other things, that people use other job descriptions as inspiration.

I agree. Surely someone in the group looking to hire a new developer has some idea as to what skills would be beneficial.

For example:

Skill Level (pick one): Junior, Mid Level, Senior

Language (pick one or more): C, C++, C#, D, Go, SQL, PHP, Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, Rust

This isn't rocket science!

No! No radar charts. Stop it.

Look at how the impression of the skill is impacted by its position around the circle and the random selection of other skills next to it.

This is not a good visualization, it implies falsehoods, and you should find a new one.

Words are worth a thousand of these pictures, if the words were written by someone who understands what they mean.

I feel like the words in a description can be self filtering. If you don't know the technical words in a job description, it might not be best for you to apply

Yeah, those guys are pretty rare. Clever doesn't scale very well.

It does, actually. It's called teaching, and you can implement it in your own culture.

>"Find the perfect fit for you in your worklife. We offer a novel approach to finding a new job based on how you will spend your time. Be the man!!"

I thought you were getting rid of horrible job descriptions.

This one turned into an ad quickly.

Not sure why people are complaining so much. It does what it says it does, the key phrase being: "... it unambiguously describes the job in a way that doesn't require reading, interpretation or additional interrogation by stakeholders..."

Perhaps you don't think that is a problem, or not a problem worth solving? That's fair enough, I suppose. I think it's cool.

I assume it generates candidate "workshapes" by letting a candidate sign-up and fill-out their own worker profile. If so, there might be another opportunity there by facilitating a way for recruiters or CTOs or whoever to generate small assessments in order to gauge a candidate's true "shape" versus relying on the candidate's self-assessment.

This seems like a great idea. In fact, I think it would make sense for companies to profile the roles of existing employees (or even better, have the employees build the profile themselves). In this way, companies can gain a better understanding of what everyone does and what it takes to keep everything running smoothly. Even the employee themselves may gain a better understanding of their job requirements after taking some time to build something like this.

The experimental section in the first screen shot - is a new feature which is focussed on doing exactly that!

The plan is that after existing team members have communicated their shapes, we can deduce what the current team is lacking and help companies hire more effectively.

How to apply this to all the other normal jobs in the world?

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