What Your Job Ad Says About You

https://www.talentstuff.com/blog/what-your-job-ad-says-about-you

by Peroni • 2 years ago

70 90 2 years ago

voidUpdate3• 2 years ago

Also can companies please send you an email when they reject your application? Just so I know that I've actually been rejected, rather than just sending an email out into the aether and never hearing anything more about it. I don't care if it's automated

varelaz• 2 years ago

This will never happen. No matter what you think, sending you reject email is opening can of worms with no benefits for the company. You can start arguing, wasting their time and resources and one day all these emails can go public with harm to their reputation.

voidUpdate3• 2 years ago

When I was trying to apply for jobs, I got two replies of any kind out of the over a hundred applications I sent out. One of them got to a pre-interview stage before rejecting me, with reasons. I currently work at the other place. How many people contest their job rejection emails when they get to a pre-interview stage or later? How many would contest them if they were immediately rejected?

bravetraveler• 2 years ago

It does happen considerably more than "never"... happened plenty of times for me! They generally won't accept risk and make a dialogue about it, getting into details like 'why'... keeping it high-level informative.

I've also had places keep it ambiguous and send an offer nearly a year after interviewing. Game theory applies, as always.

pyrale• 2 years ago

I have received many refusal emails for job applications ranging from "Unfortunately, we have filled that position" to "Following your interview, we have selected another applicant, but we'll keep your resume" to "We do not have an open position currently, but we may contact you later". I really don't see how these answers could harm these companies. Some of them actually incited me to followup a couple years later, and land a job.

On the other hand, the rude option of not answering harms the company's HR brand.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

If they don't have this courtesy, should they expect anything from the candidates in various parts of the process? Like maybe the offer was not good enough. So is it reasonable for candidate to just totally stop communicating?

A1kmm• 2 years ago

with no benefits for the company

The talent pool is not infinite, and a rejection means "we don't have a vacancy for which you are the right candidate right now", not necessarily "No way will you ever work for this company". So the core benefit of treating rejected applicants fairly, and perhaps providing them conditions under which they can re-apply ("We won't accept further applications from you in the next year, but we'd encourage you to re-apply for a suitable role after then"), and some things to work on before they could be successful in the company, then they might be an asset for the company in the future.

Likewise, companies which have a reputation for providing feedback and a polite thanks but no thanks are more likely to get applications than companies that have a reputation for ghosting.

You can start arguing

Just have a rule that all communications with the candidate go through HR (or the person responsible for coordinating hiring overall in a smaller company), and then if they reply at all to candidates arguing, just have them be firm that under policy, the decision has been made, and can't be reviewed. It's okay to ignore further correspondence if they argue.

these emails can go public with harm to their reputation

What's worse though, a reputation for ghosting candidates, or a reputation for privately sending transparent but polite feedback based on the interviews?

gwervc• 2 years ago

This is the exact kind of "treating people like shit" even before they start working that feed quiet quitting and the sentiment for employees (a word banned in the corporate lingo of my country, we are "collaborators") that jobs and companies are totally disposable too.

arp242• 2 years ago

Just ignore replies, especially when they're argumentative or rude. It's not a hard problem to solve.

Not sending a simple "sorry, we're proceeding with other candidates" is detrimental to everyone, because without knowing if you've been rejected or not you're just incentivised to send out more applications, which doesn't really benefit anyone, including companies who will now have even more applications to sift through.

Also I've had companies ghost me after doing several what seemed like promising interviews. It's okay they decided to pick someone else, but outright ignoring at this stage is just being a dick. "Begone peasant, you're not even worth talking to".

guappa• 2 years ago

Spotify is so fast. They will reject your application within seconds!

If you use an email provider they don't dislike however, you might go a step further and do a logic, language and mathematics automatic test.

Apparently they do these things because they have too many applicants and need random ways of filtering them out.

But if your problem is having too many applicants, shouldn't you stop spamming emails to people asking them to apply?

But what do I know, my email provider ends with .it so I am not hireable at spotify :D

Eddy_Viscosity2• 2 years ago

Bypassing their filtering algorithm is the first test. It's all very 5-D chess I'm sure.

Peroni4• 2 years ago

Hard agree. The companies that ghost you are purposefully avoiding interacting with you because often rejection emails trigger a back and forth where an applicant asks for feedback (a completely reasonable request) but when you've just auto-rejected 250 people, that reasonable request turns into a substantial amount of work with no upside for the company. Couple that with the perceived legal risks of poorly trained staff providing feedback that could be considered discriminatory, and you end up with an environment where it's generally considered 'easier' to just ghost you.

steveBK1236• 2 years ago

Yes. I think people imagine a seasoned professional HR person giving the legally approved form response.

Blanket rules like "do not provide feedback" exist because in a large enough org you eventually hire an idiot who will say something to a candidate that gets you sued.

prmoustache2• 2 years ago

They could totally send a rejection email with a statement saying they cannot provide feedback based on amount of applications.

drewcoo• 2 years ago

Ghosting is disappearing after back-and-forth contact has happened.

Failing to initially respond to an applicant is not ghosting. It's selection.

lnxg33k1• 2 years ago

No, they can't because they need you to ask them, in order to understand that you're really interested in the job, because doing coding tests, hours of interviews is not enough for hiring managers to understand the interest

joshstrange2• 2 years ago

This is something I strongly believe applicants deserve at a minimum. When I did hiring for my company, I made sure to send a follow-up email saying we weren’t interested within 24 hours of the interview.

Animats• 2 years ago

Try putting this in a job ad: "We will accept or reject your application within five business days. If we ask you to come in for an interview, you will have an answer at the end of that day."

If your hiring process can't perform that well, it's broken.

mattlondon• 2 years ago

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but expecting an answer the same day is a bit unrealistic IMO.

If you have a lot of candidates for example, you may not be able to physically interview them all on the same day (both for your own capacity reasons but also for candidates' own availability reasons for example).

Xelbair• 2 years ago

They never said anything about same day interview, but to inform candidates - on the first day - that interview has been scheduled.

exitb2• 2 years ago

The answer is to have less candidates. Tighten up the pre-interview phase. Ideally, this should be set up in a way that if the interview proves that the advertised capabilities are there, the person should be offered a job.

You may think that this does not fit your hiring process. If so, I think you're not really getting what you expect out of it anyway.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

I can see what you're trying to say, but realistically this timeline is unrealistic for all but entry level positions. You'll be lucky if you can schedule all your candidates in one week, never mind one day so you can give them all an answer the same day.

Clubber• 2 years ago

"We will accept or reject your application within five business days. If we ask you to come in for an interview, you will have an answer at the end of that day."

From an interviewee perspective, I appreciate what you are saying, but typically the interview process for a position could last weeks, depending on the availability of the candidates. Unfortunately, resume embellishment has increased quite a bit over the last decade or two, so candidates who look good on paper aren't great "in the field." This results in an even longer process because you have to manually (via phone call/interview) weed out the embellishers who you thought would be a good fit but weren't quite up to the ability stated in the resume.

Hiring is a slog and it sucks.

hnthrowaway1212• 2 years ago

This seems kinda unworkable. If I make you an offer today, you may need time to review it, you might want to let your other interview processes complete and then negotiate, and ultimately you might choose another offer. In the meantime I need to still be interviewing and finding good candidates - I can’t give them an offer same day if I’m already negotiating with you. But I can’t just stop the interviews after making an offer, because not all offers lead to hiring.

bastawhiz• 2 years ago

If you're min-maxing candidates, that's on you. If you're not sure that another candidate will be a better fit or not, set your bar higher. If you can't be excellent to the people you intend to hire because your processes optimize for filling headcount and pipeline efficiency, that says a lot about you and your company culture.

bulatb• 2 years ago

If the process being broken doesn't hurt them, why would they fix it?

If they don't need to fix it, what makes it broken?

I've been critical of hiring in tech for years and years and years, but hiring has only gotten worse (from my point of view) and the companies seem to be fine.

prepend2• 2 years ago

It’s broken in the sense that the applicant thinks they are the most important part of the process and should have a process that is very convenient and efficient for them.

So not actually broken, but someone idealistic or naive or clueless as to the working of a business may think it’s broken.

prepend2• 2 years ago

If your hiring process can't perform that well, it's broken.

This seems idyllic and by your measure every company has a broken process.

Perhaps they are all broken, but which are useful.

As a hiring manager, I’m balancing lots of priorities and hiring is rarely my true #1. When with early startups it’s hard to just logically review all applications within 5 days because rolling reviews are hard.

brudgers• 2 years ago

If there is a company wanting to avoid hiring high entitlement staff, longer than five business days would smell a feature not bug.

joshstrange2• 2 years ago

Tell me you’ve never managed hiring without telling me you’ve never managed hiring.

That is completely unworkable and you will end up with bad candidates or you will have to fire candidates very quickly with a process like that.

EasyMark4• 2 years ago

How can they possibly do that when they often interview multiple people for a few hours? Seems like a selection from a pool of people will take at least a week.

Peroni4• 2 years ago

OP here. Turns out if you tell people truthfully what the job actually involves rather than writing a prescriptive list of arbitrary requirements, both the quantity and quality of applications improves.

If you're responsible for writing job ads in 2024, the best advice I can give you is to disregard as many of the traditional job ad tropes as possible and write your job ad as if you're writing it for the actual human you want to hire in mind.

clumsysmurf• 2 years ago

And, it's crazy that this has to be mentioned: don't post ads for jobs that don't exist.

steveBK1236• 2 years ago

I had never considered it but its apparently a thing that big public companies post / keep up lots of fake jobs so that web scrapers see a stable/growing job posting count and infer the company is doing well financially.

panny2• 2 years ago

Hi OP. Interesting points. I get the feeling that most companies simply do not care what their advert looks like these days, since they will be flooded with 1000s of resumes no matter what they post. I've been on both sides of the hiring process, and recently changed jobs. I didn't send a single resume to a single advert to get it. I just contacted people I worked with previously. I share that because my feeling is a job posting is a last ditch effort by a company when all other avenues already failed.

ghaff• 2 years ago

It’s long been the case that networking generally works best. But lately, between the tech job market, the frequent ease of applying, and algorithmic filtering, there’s this reinforcing cycle that tends to make a random application a low odds crapshoot.

Kydlaw• 2 years ago

Hi! Informative piece to the ones that need it. Also, your last paragraphs 4 are duplicated, I guess?

Peroni4• 2 years ago

Oh wow. Totally missed that. Fixing!

layer82• 2 years ago

There are a lot of positions where if the company would tell people truthfully what the job actually involves, hardly anyone would apply.

0xEF• 2 years ago

Then they need to rethink the position.

thierrydamiba• 2 years ago

I’d imagine it’s the same thing with salary.

christophilus• 2 years ago

Good. You’ve eliminated a bunch of employees who will be miserable, and attracted the ones who actually want the job.

jareklupinski• 2 years ago

write your job ad as if you're writing it for the actual human you want to hire

this is the 'tock' after the "prompt engineer" 'tick'

binary132• 2 years ago

I see a huge number of job postings that I am highly qualified for but which scream “not welcome” / “HR nightmare”. I suspect I’m not alone in feeling this way.

EasyMark4• 2 years ago

It’s just boiler plate. I’ve worked contracts at places with “wtf?” that were great and had the inverse as well, it really just matter what the team/jefe you’re working with is like. Job ads are just a very rough approximation of what they’re looking for.

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

Personally, I have found the best jobs to be the ones with the most individualistic descriptions, rather than the cookie-cutter "Must have 5+ years of experience in X" as in the article.

Also, "team player" and "amazing opportunity" are sure signs that you should click "next".

Peroni4• 2 years ago

Yeah that’s essentially my point. Write something authentic and you’ll get a better response by default.

djbusby2• 2 years ago

Also, stop saying you're "hiring founders" - that's just not how it works.

huhkerrf• 2 years ago

I once saw an ad for a 350 person company who was hiring a "founding mobile engineer." I can't help but see it as a way to glob on to the "prestige" of being a founder without any of the benefits or equity upside.

djbusby2• 2 years ago

Or that founders take big risks, strong belief in the mission, maybe don't get paid for a while, etc. it cheapens the title for actual founders.

barrenko• 2 years ago

From one of the ads listed under this months "Who's hiring?"-

Physical Demands:

The physical demands of the position are typical of those found in a traditional office environment. Employees will not need to walk significant distances nor lift substantial weight. Employee will need to be able to remain seated at a desk for 8-9 hours in a typical workday.

Damn well I applied.

exitb2• 2 years ago

I'd love to hear the story that prompted this.

loa_in_• 2 years ago

This is very attractive, knowing the company treats applicants seriously, like human beings should be, that is really presenting the job and things that come with it. If you think __this thing about the job__ is obvious and common sense, think again. For starters, the blurb is something the inventor of copy and paste would be proud of you to duplicate wherever applicable, and there's plenty of space.

koliber• 2 years ago

It's best to post the actual salary range. However, sometimes candidates have a different expectation of whether that is low, average, or high.

To help candidates understand the compensation level, instead of "competitive salary" mention the percentile at which you are paying.

If you are paying at 60th or above percentile, this will look attractive, and be quantifiably true.

If you are paying at 50th or below, better not say anything.

Also, state all the things that are non-negotiable. If you need occasional weekends on-call, state that. If you offer remote work from different timezones, but require occasional meetings in the afternoon in US Pacific time, state that. You will avoid wasting so much time and spare future discomfort if you do.

Aachen2• 2 years ago

Stating only percentiles sounds even worse to me for two reasons:

Someone will always be paying in the first percentile, but you can't possibly advertise with that. A really well-paying job (say, CEO of Mozilla) might be a perfectly fine salary but if literally everyone else pays even more insane amounts then it sounds like the job is not worth even glancing at. By having to say the percentile, you can make any amount of compensation sound ridiculous and cannot offer a job whenever you don't have the budget to pay higher than average salaries

Perhaps even more importantly: if there were a clear market salary range, people would just look that up and ask for that compensation. As it is, people often get paid twice as much for the same job within one company because they simply don't know of each other's compensation. Across companies this becomes virtually impossible to accurately say. I can only imagine this leading to companies making up favorable numbers and nobody would truly be able to say it's below market pricing when the job ad says it's at the 80th percentile

moralestapia2• 2 years ago

Nice post but a bit shallow. There's way more bs to write about.

This ad was featured here last week (and also last month), they're a YC company. If you can get to the end of it with a straight face, I'll buy you a coffee.

https://icon.me/careers

Reads as if one, purposely, wanted to cram as much red flags as possible into a job description.

Loughla• 2 years ago

Jesus Christ that can't be real.

moralestapia2• 2 years ago

Right?

The actual description for the openings are two ambiguous and crude sentences.

Getting a lot of downvotes on that, wonder if I broke some unspoken rule by talking bad about a YC company.

jasfi• 2 years ago

They create variants from a single video from a real creator. They don't say if the examples on the career page are AI generated variants, but if they are, they're not generated from scratch.

huhtenberg2• 2 years ago

Woah. That's like blatantly obvious Nigerian scam emails - they are meant to filter out all but easily exploitable marks.

HelloNurse2• 2 years ago

Reads as if one, purposely, wanted to cram as much red flags as possible into a job description.

This is not only possible but (see for example the explicit reference to "How to succeed in MrBeast production") quite likely: they are looking for people who like the red flags.

People who believe that they are "A players", who move to New York for job opportunities and don't care about working from home, who don't intend to have a life outside work, who seriously consider a random startup something they might be fanatic about.

ungreased0675• 2 years ago

I wish there was a way to buy shorts for that company.

francisofascii• 2 years ago

Give up your life, and for what, to make influencer ads? Hopefully the money is good.

randomdata2• 2 years ago

I have yet to come across a single, justifiable excuse for not displaying a reasonable salary range on a job advert.

If you are hiring a lot of people on the regular, sure, you'll probably have a good idea what reasonable is.

If you only hire once in a while, and especially if you are trying to hire for the first time, it is impossible to know what is reasonable until you start talking to people. And in the typical case you're not going to be able to talk to the right people until you put out an ad compelling them to talk.

Perhaps you can pick at random to get the ball rolling, but your random selection probably won't be what anyone else will consider reasonable.

93po2• 2 years ago

the justifiable excuse is that it weakens salary negotiation to list a salary up front, because it might be anchoring the salary much higher than the candidate would have accepted and been happy with. i think this is fine, i think it's terrible to lie about the reason though, and basically everyone lies to you about it.

randomdata2• 2 years ago

If that's the excuse, what's the real reason?

paulmooreparks• 2 years ago

Please stop specifying a minimum number of years of experience. I have yet to see a single example where X number of years is more applicable than the context of the applicants experience. Describe what success looks like in the first 12 months rather than arbitrary experience requirements.

Oh, god, this. Please. I've been fighting this battle for my entire career. After 34 years, it's kind of difficult to count how many years I've spent on this or that skill, and even for things where I've shipped multiple solutions using TechX I may not have 5 contiguous years of experience. Is that 5 years ONLY using TechX? Does it count if I used TechX alongside TechY, TechZ, and TechAA, and was learning TechNext while doing maintenance work on TechX?

It's utterly bogus.

squidgedcricket• 2 years ago

Crazy idea - A competitive inteview

Schedule multiple people to interview at the same time. Create a tournament with brackets and events related to the job. The winner gets the job.

And of course it's fake and manipulated, the least technically competent are set up to win and the most competent set up to lose. The people with the best sportsmanship get job offers.

93po2• 2 years ago

i say this lovingly, but i hope you are never in charge of hiring anywhere.

strongly reminded of this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4n1j9lvrdeo

"During a group interview, everyone was asked to crawl around on their hands and knees and “moo like a cow”.

“We did that for about three to four minutes,” she recalls.

"At the time, I was quite annoyed. It was highly inappropriate.

"But there was a bit of peer pressure because everyone else was doing it."

The interviewer said they were trying to see if the candidates were "fun", though Ms Fu suspects that "maybe someone just had a bit of a power trip"."

lesuorac• 2 years ago

Well, they did say "events related to the job". I have no doubt that giving candidates events unrelated to the job leads to a poor interviewing experience and probably poor hiring.

EasyMark4• 2 years ago

How about speed interviewing instead of one at a time stuff, do it in parallel with equal number of interviewers and interviewees even, maybe they’ll just click.

What Your Job Ad Says About You

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