Hiring great people is often hard for most employers. Finding the right person, with the right skill set, a good attitude, and at the right price can be a lot like searching for a needle (or perhaps a small to medium sized stick) in a haystack.
There are lots of options for sourcing candidates: using a professional recruiter, tapping your personal network, or perhaps the most common method–placing an ad. As an employer it is imperative that you write a compelling job description that will appeal to the top talent you are trying to attract (btw, besides just being an ad, this can also be sent out to your network too). So what are the key elements of a good job description? And how do you stand out among the sea of other jobs? Here are some tips that I have used in the past that have been successful:
- Have a catchy title. Like a newspaper headline you need to both summarize and standout. You need to catch a candidate’s attention by being different, but still being clear about the position. A title like “Software Manager” or “Software Development Engineer” does a great job summarizing the position but is hardly interesting. Whereas “Do you want to work on the bleeding edge of technology?” sounds interesting, but doesn’t really convey the position (this could be anything from a tester to a biotechnologist). Try to pick something that clearly describes the position and is interesting — for example “Rockstar Software Engineer Wanted for Newly Funded Alternative Energy Start-up”. This title is much more appealing; it describes the field (alternative energy), the company (newly funded startup), the position (software engineer), and it adds some character with the word rockstar (and what candidate doesn’t want to think of themselves as a rockstar?).
- Clearly spell out the “must haves”. Are there any facets of the position that are non-negotiable? Clearly spell out what is required and what is desired. Also seriously think about if it is really “necessary”. If a candidate had 5 years of great coding experience and hosts their own website, is it really necessary they also have extensive experience deploying to the cloud? If it isn’t necessary then don’t make it a requirement. You could end up missing great candidates that could easily learn the skills you desire. You want to encourage these people to send their resume, so if something isn’t absolutely 100% a “must have” then list it as a desired skill (I typically separate out candidate skills into required/desired and use bullet points so the job description is easier to read).
- Add some information about the company. What is it about your company that makes it special? Is it the hard problems? The great people? A fabulous office space? Do you contribute to open source? List out some information about the actual organization and why you think people should want to work there. Make sure you include: a link to your website, any great articles or recent press mentions, and anything else that makes you stand out (for example, I worked at a company that won awards and was featured in high profile publications and I always included links to this info in the job post).
- What is the actual job? Sometimes this is obvious. Other times it isn’t. Sometimes you actually may not need to include this information since you could be hiring multiple people for more than one position, have too many projects, or your priorities might change–but you should try to give a clear idea of the job responsibilities. Of course sometimes being specific can help you target people, other times this can be a detriment since most jobs can’t be summarized in the 200 words or less devoted to this, so I tend to outline top level descriptions. Some examples might be: to write code, to help with releases and deployments, to write test plans, to collaborate on product design, to write technical specifications, to create infrastructure diagrams, to help support a 24/7 high traffic web application, etc.
- Why should someone want this job? When you think you are finished, read you posting and ask yourself this question. It should be obvious. If it isn’t totally clear then you need to add this information. You can even put this info in bullet points at the very top–you want to work here because…..(and hopefully you have good reasons, but some examples could be: challenging problems, lots of responsibility and opportunity for career growth, the chance to be part of the next big thing in [fill in the blank], great company culture, etc.)
- Add some character! One of my favorite things is to put pictures of our team at the bottom of the job posting–and candidates would constantly tell us it helped us stand out from the other job listings. We also would add little requirements and desired qualifications that were somewhat unrelated to what might be in normal job description like: “must be able to wash your own dishes” or “must like working around adorable dogs” (it was a pet friendly space). Each company is different (no matter how big or small you are) so use that to your advantage and make yourself stand out.
These are just a few tips that can help you write (or improve) a job description and that is usually the first step to attracting fabulous talent–I am sure there are lots more though! Do you have any other ideas or tips for writing your job descriptions that have worked well? If so, please include them in the comments! 
-kate
So recently I have been trying to decide what to do with my blog — it is a bit random (I am sure most of you noticed this already). I put up a new look and feel — although I am already thinking about the next design! And all of this change got me thinking about the content. So going forward I am essentially grouping my posts into 3 categories: personal posts (like this one), useful information (all my little “advice” writings), and “stuff I like”. I am thinking that I may move the “stuff I like” category into its own page and keep it separate–since, I like a lot of stuff but typically don’t post it on here because it seems so……unsubstantial. Hopefully that will improve readability and utility.
Work & Career
Have a whole lot of exciting things going on, in fact, I think I will save the details on this for its own post (or at least a later post)!
Health, Diet & Exercise
For those of you who don’t know, I started marathon training. If you are curious, you can download my little training plan–it is based off of Hal Higdon’s novice marathon training (and it was put together by my training partner Carin and based off of Novice 2). I have been tracking my workouts over the last 8-9 weeks here at MapMyRun.com. This weekend (Saturday) I am doing a 16 mile run, and next weekend a half marathon race. My training partner has been out of commission the last few weeks, which means running by myself. To get through these long runs I have found 3 very helpful things: my ipod shuffle (although I really think I need water proof headphones as I have short-circuited 2 pairs in the last month), a water belt, and sport beans (watermelon flavor of course)!
The marathon training (which I had hoped would help me lose my last 15 or so pounds) hasn’t had my desired physical effect, though. At first I gained about 7 pounds (I was seriously hungry all the time from the increased work outs). Then once I got my ravenous appetite under control (by using a food diary, and now “Lose It” on my iPhone) I was able to get back to the weight I started from (yay!). So now, I haven’t really lost any weight but my body has definitely changed. I think my butt is smaller (which I actually am not that happy about because I kind of liked it the way it was) and my stomach is bigger (which makes me really mad!). This is sooo frustrating. And other than adding some lunges and squats to fix the butt problem I am not sure what I can really do about it. I am hoping that has my miles go up over the coming weeks the weight will go down accordingly. Needless to say I am not a happy camper (although generally me + camping != happy so that is probably not the best phrase).
The marathon is November 29th.
Fashion and Shopping
After my recent fashion crisis, I went shopping and bought some cute flats. I went to Nordstrom Rack (I love that place) and found two cute pairs of MIA flats (in black patent and brown leather) at $40 each. They are so comfortable and I want to buy them in even more colors (but my whole “being frugal and not accumulating stuff” is preventing me from doing so). Now I won’t have to resort to my ugg boots and flip flops to walk to work. I also bought running shoes but those don’t count since I needed them for the marathon (just like buying office supplies don’t count because they are for work).
I also bought a new knit cap ($20) and scarf ($15 on sale) — the picture above is me wearing the scarf. I had wanted a knit cap like that since I saw a very pretty girl wearing it on the ferry during our new york trip in June.
Now the one thing I need is some running clothes. I have some old fleece pants but they drag when I run. I also only have one functional long sleeve athletic tee. So my next purchase will likely be some athletic gear.
I have been trying to re-purpose my clothing by shopping in my closet and making the most of accessories and layers a la the Uniform Project. This is good because it saves money. I am not as into the current fashions for some reason. Maybe it is because I remember the 80s (they seem to be really “in” right now). Or maybe I just haven’t found much inspiration lately. Either way it has resulted in a lot less new things.
That is it for now (long enough, huh?) Look forward to some new site updates over the next month or so!
So a few weeks ago one of my friends who is a CTO at a very successful consumer facing startup was talking to me about how they do vendor selection. We were discussing this as my team was pondering an upcoming vendor selection for a new project. It was apparent almost immediately our two companies had *very* different approach to vendor selection.
One of us posed the argument that it was better to use more established companies with a track record and strong customer base, while the other said that it was better to select a hungry startup. Here were our arguments:
Established company
- Track record — if they have customers bigger than you there is no doubt they will be able to service your needs
- You know they will be there in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years
- Less bugs/issues in a mature product
- Products are more likely to be stable and meet SLAs
- Less room to negotiate on price
- May or may not build the feature you need/want
Hungry Start-up
- Premier Treatment — if you are their biggest customer (or one of their only customers) they are going to respond to any of your issues very quickly
- Better pricing — hungry companies are going to be willing to work with you more on price
- Better chance of getting “your feature” implemented
- If they don’t have enough funding they may not be around (and then you will have the cost of adopting something new)
- Earlier stage products can have more bugs or stability issues
Both sets of criteria seem valid and certainly represent a sound way of thinking about picking a new vendor. What mechanism do you choose? Do you use criteria like amount of funding, number of employees/offices/servers, etc?
Cloud computing, it is now another one of the buzz words that is being used like crazy. However, in talking to some of my other CTO counterparts it is obvious a lot of people don’t really understand what it means to move their services into the cloud.
There are lots of articles talking about the benefits of cloud computing. This one by Slate does a good job articulating the findings from McKinsey & Co on the benefits for small business particularly around peak traffic, lack of contracts and only paying for resources that you use. The thing is that in order to really reap most of the benefits of cloud computing your software needs to be designed to take advantage of the cloud.
Here are some best practices to consider when thinking about designing an application for the cloud:
(Note, I don’t have extensive experience operating on several different cloud computing platforms, primarily Amazon’s EC2 — you can read about some of the other’s in this Information Week article)
- Assume your instances are going to go down. You can’t ever assume an instance will be available and your system better have enough redundancy to handle and fail over if something becomes unavailable. This means making sure you know how to persist state if pertinent. (war story: In the early EC2 days we used to have instances go down all the time, sometimes 2-3 at a time. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, but unlike hosted environments where you have a dedicated piece of hardware you can’t make the same availability assumptions with cloud services)
- Think about your data. Make sure you think through how to make your data available and how to propagate changes to your data. This will help you design your services as autonomously as possible, placing caching where it is needed, and make sure there are clear defined interfaces for interacting with that data.
- Deploying to the cloud is different. No longer are the days when you need to worry about log files filling up the disks (you can just store everything perpetually on a cloud storage solution like Amazon’s S3), but now you have a different set of worries. The software and tools required to deploy to the cloud are different. And a system administrator is not necessarily the best person to manage the software int he cloud. In some ways there is a new job–a cloud engineer–that understands the system internals but is also very capable of writing code. However where one system admin could manage a couple handfuls of boxes, one cloud engineer can manage 100s or even 1000s with the right set of scripts and monitoring.
- Have monitoring and lots of it. This should be true of any application, but having good monitoring and diagnostics will help you figure out problems quickly.
- Isolate your development environment, from your test/staging environment, from your production environment. This should also allow you to do more realistic testing when your test environment can be spun up and down as needed for testing–and it can look exactly like your production environment. But keep them separate to ensure good testing. This will also allow you to do things like accurate load testing and performance testing.
- Think about your points-of-failure. It could be a gateway handling incoming requests, it could be DNS, or it could be your application servers. Know what the weak-links are, and accept that vulnerability or devote resources to it.
- Make sure you have the tools/automation in place to take advantage of “peak” scaling. This is touted as one of the “benefits” of cloud computing but it will only be an benefit if you can make it automated (at least mostly automated–for the services that spin up 3,000 instances up and down you can probably get away with some manual intervention). Build the logic and instrumentation into your services to make sure that you spin up and tear down new instances as you necessary.
What are your best practices when designing your applications that run in the cloud?
Will send out handwritten cards on a schedule (having gifts/flowers would be an added bonus).
Here is the problem:
I have two sets of grandparents (don’t worry they will never read this blog). I really like sending them little greeting cards on the holidays because they really like getting them (everyone feels warm and fuzzy). The problem is I always forget. I set little alarms and notifications on my calendar (sometimes 2-3 of them!) and I still don’t pick up a card or don’t mail it (can’t find stamps, don’t know the address by heart, etc). What I would love is if I could “order” the cards a year in advance or something, and they would be hand written (no print outs) and arrive on time. I would easily pay $5 per holiday (and I would love to do them for Valentine’s, Easter, Thanksgiving, birthdays, anniversaries, etc). I would probably even send them to other people if such a service existed.
Here are two of ways of doing it (there are lots of others):
- The person sends in a big box of cards for the year (all written out) and you mail them on a specified date (say the week before birthday, anniversary, easter, etc). (This is the easiest, but I wouldn’t want to pay $5 per card for this service)
- You have a website with a selection of cards to pick from, the person selects all the cards for the year and types in a custom message for each. Then each card is handwritten and mailed at the specified date. Each year a person can do all their cards for the year. Very easy. Dates, contact info, messages and card choice should be maintained year over year.
Other cool options for #2: have boy and girl hand writing (or 5-6 handwriting styles), give so many words free in a message (say 25) and then you pay extra for each additional word, negotiate a great deal on cards by using artists you find on etsy and buying in bulk, etc
If this site exists they did a horrible job with SEO or you executed this idea very poorly because I couldn’t find it in the first 4 pages of search results for the terms “send” + “handwritten” + “card”.
my functional shoes
So I am having a bit of a fashion crisis at the moment.
About a year ago I posted about my plans to transition to take the bus instead of paying the outrageous parking costs. Well it was a successful experiment as I am still taking the bus, and I really like it (for the most part–touching the hand rails and seats still grosses me out and I will never grow accustomed to it).
However, I have started to notice that my fabulous style has declined dramatically:
- I used to always wear high heels–now I still wear high heels in the office, but have opted for a more “functional” shoe for my commute (these tend to be flip flops, flats, or ugg boots).
- These new “flat” shoes have resulted in opting for shorter hem pants, or pants that can get a little bit wrinkled or dirty (from sitting on the seats and walking through the city).
- I have to carry a big 15 inch laptop (== heavy && doesn’t fit into the cute purse-like laptop bags) which means I can’t take my super cute handbag.
- I also bring my lunch (another good way to save money and watch the waistline) but it is another thing that has to be carried (and has the potential to leak–especially salad dressings or fruit).
- Since I live in Seattle (where it is frequently quite cold and rainy) I have been opting for more “functional” jackets than my very pretty stylish coats of the past (that just don’t work that well to keep the elements at bay)
This makes me sad because I have gone from glamorous to frumpy in a short few months. What made this all hit home was as I was walking into the office one day this week I saw a guy I used to to be a coworker of mine, and I was so ashamed of how I looked I hid.
Literally, I ducked behind a mailbox and hoped he didn’t see me.
He did; and we talked (I made the excuse I dropped something by the way when he looked at my skeptically bending behind the mailbox), and since he is a guy he probably never noticed what I was wearing. BUT, it hit a point home–I really need to do something to address my sloppy “bus” fashion–and pronto.
Finally!
notice the big crack on my blackberry? it was about time.....
After using a blackberry pretty consistently since 2003 (there was a brief 2 month fling with a smartphone) over the weekend I went out and bought an iPhone (16GB 3Gs for those who are curious). Ever since leaving my job at Microsoft I have used an apple powerbook or ibook as my main computer. I had been wanting an iPhone for a while for two reasons — all the great apps (it seems like everyone and their sister is talking about this or that iPhone app) and the camera (the camera on the blackberry–at least the 1.5 year old one I was using–was just awful!). My two concerns were getting my email (I am an addict) and giving up my keypad (sometimes I think I can type faster with my thumbs than my fingers). And while I haven’t used the email that much, my typings has adapted very quickly so far!
I am seriously so in love with my new iPhone.
Currently my favorite things to do on the iPhone is play the games. In particular I have already spent too many hours on FieldRunners ($2.99), Stone Loops of Jurassica ($0.99), and reMovem (free and $3.99 version, I played the free one and then upgraded). All 3 are very fun and addictive! Although once I played all the maps with FieldRunners I got bored, so that one didn’t last as long.
I am still exploring other apps though — so far I have downloaded the Facebook app (free), Tweetie ($2.99, which I chose because I wanted a twitter app and mashable recommended it), and Lose It! (free). I really like Lose It! so far to track food, workouts, etc.I still want to find a good “To Do List” type application.
Here are the main ways I plan to use my new iPhone (besides email, text messages, maps and a phone):
- Twitter. I heart twitter.
- Pictures! I can’t wait to start snapping fashion dos and don’ts on my commute to the office.
- Food Diary. I have been wanting an easy way to track all the food I eat each day.
- Entertainment. The games are awesome. I am so amazed by how many fun little diversions I have uncovered thus far.
- Training tracking. I am training for the Seattle marathon in November, and every little workout I do feels like such an accomplishment. I am tracking them in a spreadsheet now and on mapymyrun.com, but I plan to move these to my iPhone as well (not sure how yet).
- Centralized calendar. I keep appointments everywhere! I need to unify.
- Keeping track of all my work items. I have so many plans, goals, and things to do. I am secretly hoping that the iPhone will be my secret weapon to get on top of these things once and for all.
Any apps you use that I should check out? Anything you use your iPhone for that is different or interesting? Would love to hear it and get more ideas!
