Fail: job postings
How badly can a hiring manager or recruiter mess up a job posting?
In practice, they screw up all the time. From the obvious, where they demand more years of experience in a technology than the tech has existed to the less-obvious mutually exclusive skill sets, I’ve seen and given talks about many of the mistakes hiring managers make. Rather than make a separate post about good vs. bad job postings, though, I will instead poke holes in some random non-confidential job postings that come across my inbox, particularly via mailing lists. All company names will be removed, naturally.
The following just hit my inbox. What’s wrong with it?
Job Description
Elided, a quantitative trading firm based in Chicago, has a job opening for an expert developer. The person would be responsible for developing and enhancing trading systems including exchange connectivity, overnight jobs, and databases. Supporting and maintaining production systems for several geographical markets, and participating in systems and storage configuration and maintenance.
Requirements
BA or MA Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering or related field; Candidate must be an expert in C++ and Linux, and competent in: Visual Basic, scripting (bash,awk,sed). Knowledge of tcp/ip, VLANs, 10G ethernet, Postgresql, SQL Server, RAID, clustered storage, and remote hardware deployment will be helpful. No financial experience necessary.
This was sent to a jobs mailing list for UChicago CS graduates. So, that’s either a 4-year undergrad, a Ph.D. (or drop-out master’s), or a targeted master’s student — which is usually someone without an existing strong CS background. How many things can you find wrong with this post? Here’s my list:
Major show-stoppers resulting in zero candidates:
- Visual Basic. Required. It’s rare that I see a job advertisement reduced itself to < 0.1% of the graduating students from every top university in a single shot.
- SQL Server, for a new college graduate, in this day and age. I’m not even going to comment further. And my wife worked on the SQL Server team for three years.
Minor annoyances:
- Expert developer implies many years of professional experience, probably leading a multi-year project with junior developers working alongside you on smaller portions of the project. How many of those do you think are about to graduate? And further, do you think they even need to look for a spammed job?
That said, I’ve certainly seen worse! And, in future blog posts, I’m sure I’ll cover them, too…
