Writing Better Job Ads - Eli Weinstock-Herman

This resource first appeared in issue #85 on 30 Jul 2021 and has tags Hiring: Other, Hiring: Recruiting

This is a nice lengthy post on writing job ads. And given what I see scanning job ads for research computing team managers, the advice is needed!

There’s too much for me to completely summarize, but some key points

A Job Ad is a Landing Page… A job ad is marketing. An advertisement.

I can’t agree with this enough. Even if what you have to post on your institutional jobs website is constrained to have to have all kinds of meaningless boilerplate and a dry list of job requirements - and at universities and hospitals there’s definitely some of that - there’s little to nothing stoping you from posting a job ad elsewhere, on your team’s website or on external job boards. You can direct people to the dry-as-dust “official” posting to apply.

What’s worse, most of the stuff we’re tend to put into job descriptions and job ads are… well:

[…] I’m more and more looking at “5+ years of (skill)” as an intellectually lazy statement. […] I wrote a job ad for a fungible human gear.

God yes. Even if “5 years of C++” (or whatever) was a meaningful measure, like any given 12-month period of experience working with C++ was interchangeable, it’s an input. A person with that laundry list of inputs might, if you’ve done your job well, be able to be a capable team member, but what you care about are the outputs - the results the new team member helps the team achieve. And other combinations of inputs might help the new team member accomplish those things just as well or better.

Weinstock-Herman makes the following suggestions for a process:

Start with the end in mind (always a good focus)
Create the core of the job ad first:
- What will the candidate achieve?
- What are expectations from a team member in this role?
- What are the specific tools/processes in use
- What does the team do, why is it interesting, what’s the impact?
- What does compensation, benefits look like?
Boil it down to a pitch
Work on tone, length, engagement
Test, test, test
Post thoughtfully

We have huge advantages in research for hiring. We’re helping advance the frontier of human knowledge. We’re doing meaningful work, not trying to drive up click rates on advertisements. We offer the possibility of going between multiple quite different projects, learning both new tech and new science along the way, and the possibility of outsized impact. Why do so many of our job ads read like working in our field is a chore, that could easily be done by anyone with 3 years experience in linux and 4 years in “a scripting language”?