Why Job Adverts Suck and What You Can Do About It.

At the start of this year, and many years before it the pundits of HR and Recruitment (yes, they really exist) make predictions for the year ahead.  As well as borrowing heavily from the mantras of Silicon Valley startups promising to be social, mobile and local there is always one persistent prediction that never seems to go away.

The mists in the crystal ball clear and a vision of the future appears, with absolute certainty, our forecasters declare "The Job Description will cease to exist!".  Then, as if to mock that same prescient certainty, they don't.

Despite the flaws of the formats on both side of the job seeker chasm things seem to stay the same.  Whilst the prognosticators may lament that their visions haven't been proven right the world keeps turning, recruiters still want to see your CV and HR departments the world over keep posting banal job descriptions.  As much as recruiters may decry applicants for their terrible CVs or offer advice on how not make CV mistakes there doesn't seem to be quite the same amount of concern for the job descriptions and adverts that they themselves post supposedly to entice those looking for work.

The average job description is currently a mishmash of an older version of the original specification, some amendments from an enthusiastic new hiring manager and some sexier phrases stolen from various other company's career pages.  When you stop to consider the amount of work that marketers put into a banner or headline just to make a viewer click it's mind boggling to think that recruiters expect people to consider making such an enormous change to their lives on the basis of bland copy and trite cliché.

There must be a better way... and there is...

In 1943 Abraham Maslow published his paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the Psychological Review. He posited a series of human drivers that worked sequentially, the lowest order of which must be satisfied in order to achieve the next. For example when starving to death we're unlikely to be concerned with how our peer group thinks of us, until we meet that more basic need.

 Maslow used the terms "physiological", "safety", "belonging", "esteem", "self-actualization" to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through.  If we are using the format of a job advert as a means to motivating an action from a reader, could we borrow from the Maslow model to ensure that we are writing a well rounded and engaging advertisement?  Without too much of a mental stretch it's easy to see how these stages can be made applicable to pressing on the underlying motivations a person may have when wanting to apply or even moving from casual interest to intention and ultimately action.  At the very least we could use a model to broaden the appeal of a job advert and hit more of the motivational bases that Maslow identified.

The lowest order motivator for a job seeker has to be salary.  Whilst it is foundational and important it can quickly be satisfied and judged accordingly.  Try putting the actual salary range on your job postings and voilà the majority who apply will have some idea of how much you are prepared to pay for the role.  Assuming that your job is not unpaid or a front for slave labour stating a salary is a good idea.  Promising adequate or even fair pay for a candidate's toil should never be the best motivator you have to play.  Put simply, cash should never be your "ace in the hole",  if it is it's time to rethink the role.  Try talking to some other people who already do the job and ask them why they like it. Try to gain a deeper insight into the persona of those who enjoy the job - chances are that their reasons are probably inline with a potential employee's too.  It tends to be the third party recruiters who's job postings feature salary as the biggest incentive. "Java Developer $90,000" is a great indicator that the poster hasn't really understood the real differentiators or their target audience.

For a lot of job posts salary is where we stop. There may be other details given about the company doing the recruitment or a technology stack but these will be generic and explanatory e.g. "You will write code and fix bugs" these are statements which would be true of the same role in another organisation.  How can we make this a little more personal? Maslow's second step in the hierarchy is "Safety".  For job seekers this may take the form of permanent vs. contract or the security of your company as an entity.  These can be addressed early on, from startups referring to themselves as "VC funded" or larger corporates stating successes "Safety" should be accepted as quickly as the salary stage.  If you don't meet the needs of the job seeker here i.e. lower than expected salary and indeterminate contract length they will self select out of the process, and that's a good thing at this stage.  Remember a great job advert isn't about mass appeal it's about gaining the interest of the right people.  

A growing number of companies are following in the footsteps of the larger technical organisations and offering a bewildering number of perks and free incentives to their employees.  These are the hyperbolic tales of free food, dogs in the workplace, on site masseuses and hot and cold running champagne.  Who wouldn't want those things? However a lot of job adverts fall at this hurdle.  Promising money and free things are are a great way to have someone make a small change. Switching a bank account or internet service provider maybe but surely not enough to change employers?  Job security should be implied in any job description and the benefits and perks are nice to haves - but don't be swayed into thinking they are enough.

Maslow's third tier was "belonging" or "love".  For a job advert how can we convey a sense of somewhere a candidate might want to belong?  This is where a lot of job adverts fear to tread. We stop at the inanimate perks and don't consider the social interactions that having a job will bring.  Belonging in job adverts is best conveyed through the people the candidate will be working with. Humans are (mostly) social creatures and benefit from interaction.  Who really wants to spend eight hours a day treading the same carpet as people you hate? At the other end of the spectrum who would want to work with an ex-colleague or former manager who was an inspirational leader? Who might want to join a team of renowned experts in their field?  If we make a job advert generic and impersonal e.g. "You will work with our team of developers" we risk becoming generic.  Talking about the team is an opportunity to sell successes to a candidate and gain engagement from selling the pedigree of a potential peer group.  In the world of startup it's normal to see adverts proclaiming founders who are ex-Google or ex-Facebook in this way an employer borrows some of the perceived quality bar of their previous employers.

Another consideration for the "Team" level of a job advert is how the team organise and work together.  A job may be more attractive for a reader if it explicitly states that the team don't like to hold lengthy meetings, or that they work closely with other parts of the business.  There are some great examples here that would make brilliant recruiting messages like Spotify's excellent Engineering Culture video. For those who are harbouring frustrations about their current employer's bureaucracy or lack of insight and innovation, referring to how the prospective employing company gets work done can be revealing and enlightening.  Moreover, talking candidly about these things can help convey authenticity and engender trust in the reader.

For his fourth level Maslow talked about "Esteem".  This is the need for appreciation and respect.  People need to sense that they are valued and by others and feel that they are making a contribution to the world. When employees become unhappy and disengaged they slowly start to stagnate.  If they feel under appreciated or second best to others this happens all the quicker.  It may seem obvious to mention that  people like to feel valued but in a job advertisement it is wholly appropriate to mention how the role they will play will be important to the rest of the team or company.  It's a certainty that some of the role you're advertising will be similar to other roles at other companies - in these cases it's important to differentiate at a personal level.  It's a rare candidate that wants to be a cog in machine but still I see companies loudly proclaiming they are hiring "one thousand software developers this year!" the intended message is clearly designed to be one of security, though it's hard to escape from a different "come and be one of a crowd" vibe.  Remember a good job advert spurs the correct audience into action and acts as a self selection point for those who are not right.  A job advert should not be generic enough to attract all comers - if it does you just ensure that someone will have to wade through the mire of terrible candidates and machine gun applicants that apply to everything.

Knowing that the role you are performing is worthwhile and needed is a far better motivator than the lower level "carrot and stick" incentives of salary and mock "benefits" of legally mandated holiday entitlements.  The better job adverts will mention those truly motivating factors - autonomous working, results driven environments without the reliance of rules and policies.  This further adds authenticity and can be a real differentiator for a reader.

So what's left?  You have an advert for a new job that tells a candidate they'll be adequately financially rewarded, they'll be given a great set of benefits and the company is secure so their job will be too.  You've told them about the great team they they get to work with and then you've gone on to tell them how they'll fit into that team and why the work they will do is important and needed.  If you said that was all a job could do it's still pretty compelling, but Maslow has a further tier on the road to fulfilment.  "Self- actualisation". This is the final level of psychological development that can be achieved when all basic and mental needs are essentially fulfilled and the "actualisation" of the full personal potential takes place. Research shows that when people live lives that are different from their true nature and capabilities, they are less likely to be happy than those whose goals and lives match.

In job advertising terms how can we then offer this form of greater fulfilment to a prospective candidate?  A majority of job descriptions fail in the balance of power they portray.  Despite the current market for hires becoming tighter, in far too many posts on job boards there is a weird "you should be thankful that we deign to allow you to read this" holier than thou language choice that only the most spirit crushed drone would find engaging.  However, this has become the accepted convention for weird mash-up of job description cum advert that employers post. Part internal HR document, part external facing "sexed-up" hyperbole.

Instead of using language straight out of the mouths of the mill owners of the Industrial Revolution why not let candidates know what they stand to gain from being an employee.  What are the experiences they will have that will let them grow as individuals.  Will they gain new skills or be trained in new areas?  Will they get to mentor or be mentored by other employees leading to more rewarding interactions? Will they have the scope and the freedom to be truly creative? Are they empowered to innovate? This is the future facing final tier of any great job advert and if you can hint at a brighter future for those who come and work for you it might just be the tipping point for them to hit that big red apply button.

The Magic of the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator - The Technological Panaceas of Hiring that aren't.

Hiring is scary.

Hiring is a risky process that we all know can do irreparable damage if we get it wrong.  There are countless studies that all make the case that a false positive is more damaging that a false negative.  It's hard to "undo" a bad hire.  So how do we mitigate against this?

In the world of hiring there is an anti-pattern that the answer to the question of "how to hire?" is always answered better elsewhere.  We tell ourselves there exists a panacea for hiring.  There is a strategy to beat all others.  A technology so advanced that it alone is enabling a rival to mop up all that talent that's spilling all over the place.  In effect, in making strategic decisions about technology in hiring we have outsourced our facility for critical thought.

We believe the purveyors of these advances because they come with the trappings of authority. They quote statistics in polished powerpoint presentations, wield certificates with pseudo-scientific credentials or a hat.  So much of the decision making for strategy in recruitment has become about copying our competitors.  We assume that if something is working elsewhere it will work for us. Often this is based on information that is outdated and organisations don't change their processes to fit in with the new thinking.  Take for example the role of those "impossible to answer questions" pioneered by Microsoft and later Google.  It is now industry wide common knowledge that there is no correlation between the ability to answer these brainteaser questions and the ability to perform well in the role you are interviewing for.  Yet how many organisations are still asking them because they think they should be?  When was the last time you ran an audit of the questions asked at interview in your organisation?

Ever since companies have needed to hire people there have been providers offering them magic-bullet future predicting insights into their candidates.  With just a few answers to a test you can predict the suitability of a candidate for your company.  The granddaddy of these magical tests is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

The test sorts it's takers into one of 16 different types each with a description that have now been misappropriated by HR departments to make wide ranging judgments about the suitability of prospective employees.  There have been many more erudite take downs of the lack of use of the MBTI this is a great place to start.

Here, as a primer, are a few reasons why the MBTI shouldn't be used in decision making when hiring -

• The test is based on the work of Carl Jung and uses his "types" in a way he said they shouldn't be used "Every individual is an exception to the rule," Jung wrote.
• Jung's principles were later adapted into a test by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, who had no formal training in psychology.
• The test uses false, limited binaries that force the taker into a either/or choice often on measurements where a better representation is that we are all somewhere on a spectrum.  Jung himself wrote "there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum."
• As much as 50 percent of people arrive at a different result the second time they take a test, even if it's just five weeks later.

Lastly and perhaps the best first step to make when evaluating the claims of any HR holy grail is to look at who stands to benefit from the introduction of any new test, technology or methodology.  More often than not this benefit is either financial or one of prestige.  In the case of the Myers-Briggs there is a self supporting industry of those that pay for the licensing to become testers and then propagate the test's worth within their organisations thus increasing the need for their own services.  The real winner in the "success" of the MBTI is it's producer.

This is a truism for any of the latest crazes and bandwagon technologies that present themselves in the hiring space.  If someone stands to benefit then they will tell everyone that it's the best thing ever and will change the face of recruitment as we know it.  Be wary of that hyperbole for that way lies a trail a misspent dollars.

The hard truth that we all face is of course that there is no one perfect system.  There is no solution that can be purchased that will solve all your hiring ills.  There are organisations that make great strides in their own hiring and those stories have worth.  However, as an industry we shouldn't seek to become an inferior copy of another's success.  Instead we should ask ourselves what are those aspects that seem to work for others that we could trial and adopt at our own companies.  Listen to the stories of others but know that the stories themselves are not the path to knowledge. Knowing something requires research.

We should think critically about both the message and the messenger before going ahead with those decisions that will shape our ability to attract and retain talent for years to come (or at least until the next bandwagon we jump on).

So the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator isn't magic. It's that magical thinking that is a failure of critical thinking. Not thinking critically about a testing framework that you later use as a reference point to inform your decision making is an act of sabotage against your employer... but then I would say that I'm an ENTJ.

What Developers Want - A Data-Driven Approach to Writing Engaging Adverts

When writing job adverts recruiters are often left to rely on a brief chat with the hiring manager.  They sometimes get input from one of the friendlier engineers and pair this with an old job description that has been slowly rotting on their  careers site for the past year.  The output of these less than ideal circumstances is a rehashing of the old job spec.  Some added promises of an exciting "culture" and an oblique reference to some new technology you may or may not get to use.  The advert is posted in the normal places and with little fanfare proceeds to garner a lacklustre response from candidates. A talent pool that is already bombarded with competing offers.

There must be a better way.  What if we could write a job description using the same words and phrases that our target audience are looking for?  If we could ask a large enough group of people what they are looking for then we could pull themes and even individual words from this dataset to create and advert that was engaging. Better yet, we wouldn't have to resort to the cliches and stock phrases from all the other job descriptions.

Coming by this dataset isn't easy, few people have the time to go out and interview the hundreds of prospective candidates needed to make it representative.  Even if an employer did this the data would likely be skewed by experimenter bias.  If only there was a way of reliably collecting this data from developers who felt free to say whatever they wanted.  Recently I discovered a way to do exactly this. Better yet the data was already captured for me.  

Hire my Friend is a new sourcing tool aiming to address the need for talent in the world of startups. Aiming to not expose that talent to unscrupulous recruiters or the volumes of spam they would receive on other sites.  Additionally it has some cool recommendation features, which made "endorsement" meaningful again.  I care more if a developer rates another developer highly than if the same assurance of expertise came from a colleague in sales, a school friend or their mum.  

On looking at the tool I noticed that candidate profiles, though anonymous and containing all the usual information, also asked one important question.  "What are you looking for?".  Suddenly I had impartial answers to that question from 13,000 (and growing) Engineers, Marketers and UX Designers.  After running a search for Ruby developers in London I had the data I needed, I pasted the answers into one long document and made that into a word cloud.  The larger the word the more frequently it occurs in the responses.

What Developers are actually looking for...

So what does this tell us?  Firstly that Hire my Friend's users are very much on target.  The majority of users are looking for work in small, startup teams.  It's the the details here that are more interesting for me.  I have always said that offering a job that is both rewarding and challenging is attractive, i.e. referring to actual problems to solve.  This is borne out by the answers given, the words problem, challenging, learning, solving and knowledge feature heavily.  The second biggest takeaway for me is the importance in stressing the "why" of the role you're hiring for.  Why is the work important? How will it impact the larger team and the rest of the company?  In describing the work we should ensure that we stress those elements that are "creative", "fascinating", "exciting" and "cool".

So given these answers how can we measure a job description against the data?  The same process can be used to evaluate our own job descriptions - here's mine

From the advert

For me the obvious difference here is between the active and the passive.  The job description has some of the same elements but still has some scope to be a better match. In a passive sentence, the subject of the sentence is acted upon rather than performing the action.  For a potential candidate this could mean that they are left with a sense of being used like a resource or that their individual importance in being downplayed.  What job seeker wants to be part of a massive swathe of hiring to become a cog in a machine? None I'd want to hire.  As William Zinsser says in his book On Writing Well, “active verbs push hard and passive verbs tug fitfully" a job advert should be a compelling call to action.

I'm going to use the Hire my Friend data to write different adverts and do my own A/B test.  It will be interesting to see if matching the word choice and elevation of individual over the companies own needs makes the difference I think it will.  I'll let you know how I get on.

On "Culture" - “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means”.

How many job adverts currently advertise a "great culture", "a start-up culture" or a "Google-like culture"?  It seems as though the only company not shouting about how Google-like their culture is are Google themselves.  It's a particular bugbear of mine at the moment because it's not only a trite cliché it's also meaningless.

"Culture" as it is currently being used in job adverts has come to mean little more than a perk.  "Salary, Bonus, Life Insurance, Great Culture".  Whilst this doesn't make the top ten in my all time annoyances with how jobs are advertised it does make the mistake of entirely missing the point.  If the "culture" is a differentiator why wouldn't you tell a prospective candidate about it in lavish detail?  I think the issue here might be one of misunderstanding of the term.

So what is culture?  Broadly defined the culture of a company is the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular group or society.  These are the building blocks, the elemental stage of what we collectively called culture.  Without description of these ideas, customs and behaviours and why they are good bad or of no interest to a candidate mentioning it is redundant.

So what isn't culture?  Another facet of a lack of description in a job advert is a description of the wrong things a quick scan of well intentioned descriptions lists "beers in the office", "foosball" and "free food".  These things are not culture.  Just like empty pyramids and papyrus scrolls are not the sum total of Ancient Egypt any more so than the Parthenon and Feta cheese are the whole of Greece.  Whilst these things are of cultural significance as parts of a job description without more insight they are little more than window dressing, set up to be dismissed by all but the most earnest of job hunters.  Whilst a recruiter may think that they are choosing the most attractive attributes of a compensation package they must also ask themselves do they really want to attract the candidate who favours a free lunch over a technology choice or a chance for progression?

I think the answer lies in a system of first and second order signifiers when talking about culture.  Those elements you call attention to first should be the most pertinent to your audience.  In the case of a Developer role for example I think we should assume that a candidate would want to know what technologies are involved, how the company writes code, how the teams are organised etc.  I'd hope a great candidate would want to know all of this before hearing about the details of a benefits package...even if they include "onsite barber" and "free laundry".  These first order signifiers should be discovered when a recruiter qualifies a requisition.  This is the true insider knowledge and where the true indicators of culture lie, for example when saying the company has a flat-structure give the signifiers of this - small functional teams, 360 review process, accessibility to senior management.  If you say a company is innovative, tell the candidate how this is manifest - hackathons, internal discussion forum, cross functional collaboration etc.  Don't just say those Ancient Egyptians were "Good builders" tell me about the pyramids!  If you don't you're missing the best opportunity.  Make the sell of the role more compelling through authenticity, not just spewing the benefits package verbatim - don't be a perk-ulator.

Those second order signifiers are those items that apply to the general population of an organisation i.e. not role specific but company specific.  These are best used to reinforce the company's values, attitudes and beliefs.  If possible these should be coupled with assumptions that let the reader know about the thought behind them.  Google's "20% time" (despite it's rumoured death) and Zappo's "$2000 to quit" are great examples of this and offer a great stepping off point for later discussion with candidates.

Remember, the ideal job advert is not only attractive to those people you want to hire but also screens out those you do not.  If you write a generic job advertisement you will get a generic response.  A correctly worded ad to the right audience is a great first filter.  Candidates are not stupid, they will self select if they feel the role suits them and that is what should happen.  If you write a job description that everyone likes, everyone will apply but then of course you don't want to hire everyone...

Innovation in Sourcing - Standing out from the crowd

The word "Sourcing" has come to be used in a particular way recently.  In an age of "social recruiting" the meaning of sourcing has become narrowed to the point that it really only relates to new ways of searching the internet or the latest in a long line of software tools to interrogate ever growing datasets.  However, as recruiters, often we already know who we want to target.  We know the companies they work for, we know the skills they possess, we know their titles, in some cases we even know their names.  The overly stalkerish amongst us sometimes even know their addresses...

In recent years there have been a number of landmark instances using more non-traditional tactics.  New companies wanting to make an impact, older organisations seeking out particular known individuals or just a grand gesture of recruitment, recruitment as an event or spectacle, existing to generate a larger story with the resulting publicity driving even more people to learn about the company. Further, frustrations over "access" to these candidates forces more innovative companies to imagine more and more innovative solutions to get their message across.  Some are clever, some confrontational, but all of them have made an impact beyond their original target audience.  Here are some of my favourites from over the years.

 In 2003 Electronic Arts in Canada took out some billboard space near the offices of rival games developer Radical Entertainment. Near enough to be read by the developers at Radical who had no problem working out that the message reads "We're Hiring".    The results of this obviously confrontational stance by EA didn't really do them much good - the team at Radical garnered a lot of positive press. The public love an underdog it seems.  Founder and CEO at Radical, Ian Wilkinson sums it up well "This has been far more aggressive than past attempts, but I have no reason to believe that this will be any more effective."

So overtly hostile attempts can often be jarring and work against you - at the very least they convey a lot more about the brand than was originally intended.  Here, EA were the giant trying to take down an independent success story, it didn't work but it has been done better.


Enter Google.  In 2004 this billboard appeared near the Ralston exit leading to Santa Clara, California.  A prime location for attracting the attention of the employees of Silicon Valley as they sat in traffic on their way to work.  Free from any branding the billboard itself is a challenge.  Perfectly aimed at their target audience of engineers and researchers who love to solve problems.   The problem itself led to a url that in turn led to another problem and eventually a pay-off and reveal that it was a Google recruiting strategy.  This is still talked about today as being ground-breaking and it certainly aided in the establishment of the mythical status of Google's hiring process.  Looking back it's easy to assume that "of course it's Google" but at the time they were pre-IPO, 1907 employees (as of March 2004) and they were already doing truly innovative things.  Interestingly, it also didn't stop them pursuing other more "grey" tactics too - at the same time they were winning hearts and minds, and enjoying massive viral publicity with their billboard they were also sponsoring job adverts in their own search results.  As well as sponsoring traditional job applicant search terms they also sponsored ads on the keyword/name "Udi Manber", who was then chief of Amazon.com's search technology unit, A9.  It would be just two years later that Udi joined Google...

These are both still broadcast messages, though it's true they act as a filter for talent, so the organisations only have to deal with those people who are able to answer the questions.  What if you already know who you want to talk to?  Not a type of person or a profile - what if you actually know the person?  

Video game start-up Red 5 Studios handpicked about 100 dream candidates, spent time learning about their backgrounds and interests from social networks and personal blogs, and airmailed each one a personalized iPod, inside 5 artistic nested boxes complete with a recorded message from CEO Mark Kern. More than 90 recipients responded to the pitch, three left their jobs to come on board, and many more potential hires discovered the company through word-of-mouth buzz generated by the search.  Whilst it is true that these types of initiatives have a higher initial cost for the more price-conscious organisation this can be mitigated by the quality of the potential audience - they targeted their "dream" employees. The saving in costs versus the same approaches made through an third party recruitment firm are not to be sniffed at.  Chances are a single hire made through an agency would have exceeded the total cost of this project.  There's also a third more intangible return on investment, the virality of this approach.  I am confident that there is a secondary impact of this type of approach the effect on other employees in the target organisation when told about the parcel and now the impact of this type of approach being shared on social media - the outlets of which have increased exponentially since Red 5 Studios did this in 2007.  

Facebook did something very similar in 2013 for hardware engineers.  As a pilot program they sent branded Raspberry Pi's to potential candidates they had identified as a good potential fit.  On connecting the credit-card-sized single-board computer they were presented with a personalized video giving them a tour of the working environment and a brief of where they would potentially fit in.  This type of approach is hard to ignore.

A mobile handset manufacturer could send their latest handset with a willing hiring manager's number pre-installed?  This would both show off the product and demonstrate the value the company see in the candidate.  Spotify already send tongue-in-cheek playlists to potential candidates, demonstrating the product in a fun way as well as letting the candidate know they are hiring.  There are dozens of these initiatives going on all the time.  Sitting back and waiting to resumes is unforgivable - what can your organisation do to differentiate itself?    

On Hiring Technical Women

I believe that even in my lifetime the advances that have been made in technology have been a great leveller.  Technology has enabled so much collaboration across so many different boundaries, across culture, geography, age, race and gender.  Even in my own career I have worked alongside teams from all over the world, on one particular project we had Brazilian, Chinese, and Dutch developers, working with an Australian project manager and a business analyst from Portugal working from a London office for a US based client.  They were a range of ages, races and genders.  I think the software they produced was better for the team's diversity.  Their range of viewpoints and backgrounds enabled them to better empathise with the eventual users of the software they were building.

I've been incredibly fortunate as the employers I've worked for not only recognised the importance of diverse teams but were also prepared to invest both the time and sometimes the money that was necessary to source candidates from non-traditional backgrounds.  The industry is already well aware that there is a shortage of technical women.  There are some brilliant initiatives in this area and most importantly some truly inspirational female role models for those entering employment.  I've been exceptionally lucky to work with just a few of them.  It seems as though the more forward thinking of employers have woken up to the realisation that a diverse workforce is a boon to productivity and the collective intelligence of teams.  These are leaps forward and while we should keep striving and not become complacent it is in the implementation of these initiatives that I have noticed some actions which are increasingly counter-productive.  Some recruiters, despite the best intentions, are doing more to alienate potential female candidates than encourage them.

I do not know how women feel about the hiring process, nor do I believe they think as a collective hive-mind, so whenever I get the chance I ask them for feedback.  How was the hiring process? What did they enjoy? What could I improve?  Questions I ask of all the candidates I shepherd through their recruitment process.  At a previous employer we had a kind of focus group of female developers and business analysts set to explore one questions "how can we hire more females?".  Whilst there were lot of ideas in the room there was one recurring theme that often stopped potential ideas in their tracks - no one wanted to feel or make others feel that the bar was being lowered for them.  They didn't want women only interview days, they didn't want woman-targeted advertising and they didn't want to be commoditised with the offer of increased referral bonuses for female candidates.

It is in trying to work against the stereotype of the "programmer" that recruiters often fall into the trap of pandering to an equally divisive stereotype.  Whilst stand-out cases of obvious crassness make news, like the ad posted to the Ruby User group offering female co-workers as a perk or at the other end of the spectrum LinkedIn's ban of a job ad showing a female web developer because it was "offensive", it's apparent that even when the industry thinks it's doing the right thing often it just gets weird.  Pink adverts, adverts featuring photos of lip stick and high heels (really) there have been some truly odd attempts to attract female candidates when filtered though the lens of a recruiting department.

Recently I met with a representative from a university women's group. She described a meeting with the Diversity Recruiters at a large investment bank.  They wanted to be involved with the women's society and wondered what would be the best thing they could do.  The women's group leader suggested that they might like to sponsor a scholarship for one of the female students.  A relatively modest award would ensure that a student would be "theirs", branded as such and available for publicity. This would also ensure that the lucky recipient would be relieved of some financial burden, maybe give up a part-time job, devote more time to study, even fair better because of it.  The Diversity Recruiters didn't agree that this would be the best use of the money, they wanted in their words a greater "return on investment".  So what was their suggestion?

Afternoon tea in a posh hotel.  The budget? The same as the scholarship.  This is a perfect example of not knowing your audience, of not understanding or at least not empathising.  The twee sensibilities of an HR department woefully out of touch with the audience they were trying to engage.    A true opportunity to help was squandered in favour of cream teas.  It's exactly the brand of corporatism that sees a company say they do work for the environment because they have a photo of the CEO planting a tree on their website.  It may well be benign but it's also pointless.  Gender like any diversity characteristic is too often treated as a checkbox item. It's as though some recruiters are more looking for Pokemon than people.

So how do I hire female developers?

I aim to hire highly-skilled, passionate people.  The adverts I place aren't for "Ninjas" or "Rockstars" or other "brogrammer" terms,  they are for software engineers, for people who like solving problems and who like having their work make an impact.  So how do I ensure I'm reaching out to technical women too?  I source, a lot.  As women area smaller minority of the greater technical population you have to look through more of that population to find them.  It's labour intensive but they are there you just have to look.  I have still run women only hackathons, and relied on the advice of organisations like Women in Technology and advertised in media aimed at a female audience, even increased the bounty for the successful referral of a female developer.  However, as a recruiter, first and foremost the thing I try to do is appeal to a passion for technology and find the best people I can.  If I'm looking for highly skilled people who are passionate about technology I know that I'm going to find some females in that group and I'm going to do my best to make sure that when I do talk to them it's with a relevant and interesting opportunity...but then that's what I want for every candidate.

Hacking the application process - A cheat mode for Developers

In a previous post I talked about resumes from candidates that applied direct being seen as secondary to those candidates who were sourced by internal recruiters.  In some organisations recruiters will go out of their way to extol the virtues of a candidate to a hiring manager simply because they were hard to find or it took a long time to tease a CV out of the candidate.  All this is at the cost of a potentially more suitable, talented CV that is sat in an applicant tracking system, dusty and unloved.

How can you get that in-house recruiter who seems to be ignoring you to advocate for you in the same way?  How can you be sure that your resume is presented in the same way, in that flurry of excitement?

You can't.  Sorry.  There are hundreds of reasons that the recruiter hasn't go back to you, none of them good enough to warrant ignoring you.

This is of course understandably bad news, but there is a way around this and perhaps it will give you a better insight into the company culture and the role you are applying for.  First step research the company you want to apply for on LinkedIn.  In the same way a  recruiter would find your profile on LinkedIn, look for someone who would be a peer or a manager of a team you'd like to join.  Contact them and ask them about their role, ask them all the questions that you didn't get the answers to by reading the job description.  Mention that you'd like to apply, ask the person you're in contact with to look over your CV.

Ideally the short cut you are taking is to game the internal referral process of your chosen target company and have an existing employee advocate for you.  The pressure you are really exploiting here is the perceived imbalance of power between the HR department and "the business".  The cachet that is attached to a CV that is referred is often enough to force the attention of recruiters as there is a pressure to be answerable to the employee who handed the CV to them, in short the process will be expedited.  Doing this won't increase your skills or suitability for the job but it will mean you are at least seen and considered, not left to languish in an inbox.

For recruiters who feel I may be doing them a disservice in encouraging this sort of behaviour I'd offer a little by way of explanation.  Build relationships with your hiring managers, communicate with them effectively and you'll find they are by far the best arbiters of prospective candidates - and ultimately they are on your side.

On Becoming Discoverable - advice for job applicants

Eventually there comes a time in every period of employment that an employee starts to imagine the greener pastures that exist in other offices.  It's not that they've been courted by an unscrupulous recruiter, it's not that they are moving town or countries, it's not even that they've been fired for stealing stationery supplies and selling them on eBay. They've decided it's time to leave and it's on their own terms.

They lovingly craft themselves a new CV. They toy with the idea of of a video resume, or an infographic to show their creativity...then fire up Word and smoosh their details into a template.  They search the internet for a new role. They trawl LinkedIn and then they  find something; a glimmer of what might be.  They measure themselves against the requirements, ask friends about the company, research using Glassdoor and finally they click "Apply".

Then... nothing.

They were right for the role.  All the requisite skills, even a few extra ones that the hiring managers would love. So why are not being courted, loved, made to feel like the beautiful and unique snowflake they are by a whole gaggle of in-house recruiters?  Why are they lost, trapped in a black hole, ignored?

The answer...because they applied.

In many of the recruitment teams I have managed to date there is a odd behavioural pattern that I have noticed more than once.  Those CV's that have arrived through direct application are not as valued or deemed inferior to those that have been head hunted or sourced through some circuitous route.  This leads to a selection bias on the part of the recruiter to over state the suitability of a candidate that has been sourced through toil and denigrate the suitability of those candidates who apply directly because of their availability.  Because we have been told many times that the "good" candidates "aren't looking" or are "passive", those that are active must be inferior. This despite metrics that directly show that 10 to 15% of hires had come through direct applications!

There are many reasons why this could have happened.  The "groupthink" or herd behaviour of the team seeking to emulate a strong performer, a little cultural inheritance from a previous job or even an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect - the recruiter valuing their own perceived skills over that which lacked their "superior" touch.

It may not be the fault of the recruiter.  Some of the organisations I have seen use an applicant tracking system that deposits CV's of applicants to be viewed into "bins" or "buckets".  There has to be some linguistic reinforcement of perceived value here.  When I think of the contents of these inanimate objects I don't really see it positively.  In British English a "bin" is where we put rubbish or trash and a "bucket" is used for cleaning, it's association is with dirt or grime.  How many bins and buckets are filled with gold, or diamonds, or unicorns!  Institutionally we can do something to aid the shaping of behaviour here, why not refer to an internal talent "pool" and try to excise the negativity that could aid prejudgement?

So what can a candidate do?  My advice to a candidate looking for work is to make themselves discoverable.  Prior to applying, try to ensure that you have a footprint that means you can be found on the internet.  Google yourself.  Know where it is that recruiters will look for people with your skills.  For the developers and software engineers that I recruit there are a wealth of venues to utilise.  I am assuming you're OK with surrendering a little privacy to be discovered...

Firstly, LinkedIn.  Have a profile, make that profile detailed, feel cheap and dirty with all the spam you'll get you can always shutter it or delete it all together when you've found that dream job.  For a growing majority of recruiters LinkedIn is the first port of call, for some it's their only port of call.

Secondly, as a developer or an software engineer if you don't have an account on Stack Overflow you should. Any forum which is monetised for recruiters is a sure sign that recruiters are there and searching for candidates.

Thirdly, broaden your other social media footprint.  Have a G+ account, have a Twitter account, take down the drunken photos on Facebook because the more savvy recruiters out there will be looking here for you too.  If you list a job title or a company this will make you more likely to be found - check that "other" message inbox from time to time too!

Even if you only did these few things, pretty low effort, you'd be on the radar of more recruiters more of the time.  Now add to this your own blog, open source software contributions, your own website to further aggregate this stuff and you'll be surrounded in no time, of course when you've found that dream job you can take back some privacy and close or hide these accounts - you've only had to deal with those rascally recruiters on your terms and when you wanted to, that has to be better than sending that CV into the void, only for it to land in a "bucket", right?

On the Cultural Normalization of the Recruitment Process

The recruitment process of old is long dead. The didactic hierarchy of employer as king and the cowering potential employee grateful for the opportunity "just to be here" is over.  In the tired metaphor of the "War for Talent", talent has won. Employers must now be more venturesome than ever before in their sourcing and courting of talent to add to their organisations.  We have seen the growth of internal sourcing functions, the lessening of reliance of third party agencies and entire internal recruiting departments swell in numbers.

No where has the pressure to uncover this talent been more pronounced than in the expansion of the global technical giants.  In the race to become dominant there is no country left un-visited, no university left un-plundered and no diversity group left un-infiltrated.  However, in the growth of these organisations where talent can be a direct corporate advantage there is a strange byproduct of the economic choices they have made.

Dublin is a city with just under two million people in the Greater Dublin area and due to it's lucrative tax incentives for companies to set up European headquarters there has more than it's share of large internet brands. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and eBay all have offices in the city to name just a few - a large number of the employees to staff these organisations are imported from the continent or further a field but the staff to support these are usually local hires, this is a rapidly decreasing pool of people who have the relevant experience and the availability.  Due to another cost reduction incentive - the use of the 11 month contract - many of these staff, particularly those in the HR organisations have worked at one, if not more of the other organisations.  This is where I feel the problem lies.  It's not that these individuals aren't great recruiters, all I've met in interviews and at events are, but in crossing the cultural boundaries, in joining new organisations they bring something of that culture with them.  This cultural inheritance is not only evident in physical objects but also customs, ideas and values.  When a recruiter from another organisation joins yours they have a preformed conception of what "works" proven by their previous experiences.  It is wholly natural for them to wish to replicate these experiences.  This can lead to practices that "borrow" heavily from the previous employer, from the selection of a software tool because "it worked for X company", the treatment of candidates in a process "we never gave feedback at X company" or even the style and number of interviews a candidate faces all can be held up to be judged as good and replicated accordingly.  There are always more insidious aspects of cultural inheritance here too, over engineered administrative processes, biases in sourcing and overly lengthy approval chains to name a few.

So why is this a bad thing?  If it works it's good right?  Right?

Maybe.  However, there is a casualty here.  Entire recruitment processes at these large organisations are becoming homogenized.  The recruiters, heavily targeted and fighting for a position at the end of their 11 month contract revert to "what works" rather than a recruitment process that will do more than simply test the suitability of a potential employee; it will communicate a true reflection of that company's culture.  As the number of organisations looking for great technical talent increases still further they seek to replicate processes that they assume are effective - how many organisations are still asking candidates "How many piano tuners are there in Brazil?" even when Google themselves have moved away from these questions, calling them "a complete waste of time".  The homogenization of hiring cultures across organisations will only lead to a lack of innovation, a cultural blandness that will leave the candidates unimpressed and the recruiters unfulfilled, cogs in a process.  Whether or not you aspire to a hire talent of the same calibre as Google or Facebook perhaps the answer lies not in the "Googlification", "Facebookification" or Nextbigthing-ification" of your hiring process but in the effective communication of your own corporate culture.  If we accept that the recruitment process is also a time for candidates to learn about your organisation an awareness of what you actually want them to learn might be a good thing.  Rather than be the beige old porridge, the pale imitation of a recruiter's previous employer why not look upon the recruitment process as a great chance to iterate, looking for ways to continuously improve,  to provide true value to the organisation.  You could even borrow from software development practices and look at A/B testing to see which practices work better for your candidates (yes you should always ask them for feedback), just don't get them to dance, that might be differentiation you don't want!

In conclusion, when building a recruitment team, adding to an existing team or even changing policies and processes - caveat emptor.  Ensure that you're not adopting practices have worked for you previously without holding them up to the scrutiny of your new situation.