Increase your hiring success with job success profiles

This resource first appeared in issue #76 on 29 May 2021 and has tags Hiring: Other, Hiring: Creating a Job Description

Increase your hiring success with job success profiles - Rod Begbie, LeadDev

This sounds like how hiring works at most of the research computing teams I’ve seen:

I’d seen enough job postings in my life to know you just had to come up with some qualifications (‘BS or equivalent in Computer Science’, ‘5+ years experience with Python’, maybe even a cheeky ‘Ability to work both independently and as part of a team’), throw them into a bulleted list, and start picking the best candidates from the resumes that will surely flood in

It’s hard to know if someone will be a good candidate for a job if you don’t know what success will look like for that role. Most people involved in the candidate selection and hiring process probably have a half-formed implicit idea of what that would look like, but they’re probably different. Unless it’s written down, it won’t be well though-out, agreed upon, and applied consistently.

Begbie suggests having clear primary objectives for the job, secondary objectives, and success indicators for 30 days/90 days/6 months/12 months. Not only does this clarify things internally and greatly increase the odds that you’ll be looking for the right people, by putting this information in the job ad you’re much more likely to attract candidates who actually want that job.