The Recruiting Competitive Advantage

A Job Listing

Let’s say you were walking down a street one day and noticed an ad for help wanted. It is posted in the window of a bakery. It reads:

HELP WANTED:
Need a baker for FT work. Must be familiar with modern baking methods such as ovens, barbecuing, and deep fryers. 5+ years experience with the Super 6 commercial baking oven required (aside: came out in 2014). Nice to haves include experience with butcher’s blocks, chopping meat, and making candles.

Given that most of us understand the high-level job of a baker pretty well, it’s easy to see how totally ridiculous this job listing is. Let’s break it down:

Need a baker for FT work.

Doesn’t say too much, but it makes sense and describes your need accurately.

Must be familiar with modern baking methods such as ovens, barbecuing, and deep fryers.

Most bakers would be familiar with ovens, but no baker in their right mind would ever “bake” with a barbecue or deep fryer. At this point we begin to question whether or not this bakery has any idea of what it’s doing at all.

5+ years experience with the Super 6 commercial oven required (aside: came out 2 years ago).

Well, they want me to have 5 years of experience (or more) with an oven that has existed for only 2 years? That’s just silly. Now I think that they’re sort of out to lunch and don’t really want to work here.

Nice to haves include experience with butcher’s blocks, chopping meat, and making candles.

A baker is a very specialized position. There’s rarely going to be one who has specialized in not just baking but also butchery and candlestick making (catch my sly joke there?). A place asking for all 3 is really asking for 1 person to do 3 jobs for the price of 1 job. This isn’t fair and further dissuades the candidate.

Ridiculous Expectations

This job posting sounds funny because it’s plain to see just how insanely off-kilter it is. However, recruiters are out there right now posting tech job listings that are just as ludicrous. The problem is that they haven’t bothered to learn much about the field that their job is focused around. So, they end up sounding as silly as the bakery owner does above.

Recruiters: this is how silly you sound to developers when you post a listing full of jargon that you don’t understand. Most of us don’t want to ever work on both C# and Java at the same time, and the odds of finding both an iOS and Android pro in one human being are slim-to-none.

The Recruiting Edge

All that is required for a recruiter to gain a significant competitive advantage over their peers is a little knowledge. Knowledge that could be learned in weeks. Knowledge of a standard tech stack, and the ability to Google technical acronyms like MVC and EF when they show up. If you just took a little time to make sure that your job listing was not a walking contradiction – full of statements that counter each other, technologies that don’t work together, and demanding 5+ years of experience on things that have existed for less than 2 years – you’d have a huge leg up on your peers.

Developers are rational, logical people. We will engage in the jobs that make sense. If your listing is irrational or illogical, we will avoid you like the plague. We will also make fun of your job listing to our friends, especially when you spammed e-mailed us with it directly.

So, if you’re a recruiter reading this, and you want to get ahead, it’s very simple. Learn the tech that your listing is based around at a high level (in my opinion a basic proficiency of your profession), or failing that, consult a developer to make sure that your listing doesn’t sound crazy!


See also