I'm also pretty late to the party, but I wanted to chime in.
The one, single thing that I wish more job descriptions had is, for lack
of a better phrasing, "what's in it for me?".
You can safely assume that any desirable candidate is deluged with
recruiter emails, gentle queries from friends, advertisements on many
websites they visit, etc. If they decide to start looking for a new job,
there's lots of jobs waiting for them. The way to distinguish yourself
in such a crowded field is to explain what your environment has to offer
that a candidate couldn't get anywhere else. What characteristics
separate your company from competitors in your industry, or in the
system administration field as a whole? What do you have to offer to
candidates _besides_ a paycheck?
Some suggestions for things that might appeal to people:
- You have a large and heterogeneous environment for people to
experiment with, so a candidate might reasonably expect to gain
experience with a lot of different systems quickly.
- You have some specific significant project that you're planning to
start up, so a candidate might be enticed to get in on the ground floor
of such. For example, "We're going to stand up configuration management
from scratch on all XX of our servers" would be very attractive to some
people I know.
- Perhaps you might pay at- or below-market, but you have a large budget
for new hardware, so a candidate could work with the newest
bleeding-edge technologies (100-gigabit Ethernet!).
- You expect candidates to wear DevOps hats, so you might emphasize
opportunities to do development or systems programming in addition to
the usual IT responsibilities.
Most job descriptions I encounter are just a word salad of "innovative",
"intriguing", "cutting-edge", and other such superlatives; I would
personally be much more intrigued by an ad that gave me a solid sense of
what I could learn and how I could improve myself by joining your shop.
- Adam Compton
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 03:59:06PM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
[I *think* this is the right list. Arguably, lopsa-profession would
be better, but it appears to be completely defunct, or so the archives
would have me believe. Please redirect me if warranted.]
I'm the lead sysadmin, network engineer, and occasional HVAC tech at
a small software shop near Boston. We're a combined IT and operations
team of three, and we need to be four, and that means writing a want ad.
The majority of want ads fall into a few easily sortable
buckets:
- the large company where everything about hiring is controlled
by HR. The ad features an acre of boilerplate text, legal reassurances
that mean nothing because violating them really would be illegal, and
ends with an invitation to submit a resume at a website which either
asks you to complete a dozen-page profile or mangles the parsing of
your uploaded resume... or both.
- the startup buzzword factory looking for a SuperNinjaRockStar DevOps
person.
- the non-technical company which wrote a job description by
summarizing what people think Bob did, and wants somebody just like Bob.
(Sometimes this works out well. Other times, it turns out that
the reason Bob left is that nobody recognized what he was really
doing to hold the company together.)
- the recruiter who has a list of technological skills that must
be checked off, but no actual understanding of the company or the job.
Please assume, for the sake of discussion, that we can avoid
most of the above traps.
What, as an experienced systems administrator, could actually attract
your attention to a job ad? What holds your attention long enough for
you to write a thoughtful cover letter and update your resume?
Suggestions from this thread are likely to be used in an ad on
sajobs in the near future.
-dsr-
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