Note: I wrote this post before I wrote the "Guitars are people, too" post, and it would have made more sense if I posted this one first. But I didn't, so it's a bit out of context. If there's anything that doesn't quite make sense, this may or may not be the reason. Another possibility is that you just don't enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy writing them.
Alright, here we go. I started this blog with three softball posts about how hard it is to name things. Now I'm taking a proverbial hard-right turn and writing about how hard it is to hire people to work at my company.
Hiring is hard. And it's arguably the most important aspect of running a company. If you have a great team, you can accomplish a lot. You can cover deficiencies in your process, you can overcome challenges that inevitably arise in any project. If you're surrounded by a great team, you can go into work and have a pretty good chance of enjoying your day.
Emberex (that's my company) has been around for more than 10 years. And we've been slowly growing (and thus, hiring) for pretty much the whole time. And every time we need to hire, we start by putting out a job ad. Writing a good job ad is hard. We've written long ones, short ones, dry ones, funny ones, informative ones, useless ones, and so on. As it turns out, I hate many of them. I don't like writing them, I don't like reading them, and it's difficult to know how the ad itself affects the pool of applicants. Recently, we needed to hire two Tier 2 Technical Support Engineers. So I tried something different - I wrote an ad that I really liked, different from the standard job postings that I see all over the place. I enjoyed writing it, and I got a lot of good feedback about it. So much good feedback, in fact, that it inspired me to start writing a blog. I got comments from applicants like, "This is the best job ad I've ever seen!" And this, from Eugene Tech Jobs:
"Emberex has an absolutely fantastic job posting available for a Tier 2 Technical Support Engineer. They also have a job opening of the same name. Even if you’re not interested in the job itself, you definitely want to pop over to see how job postings should be written."
We got a lot of strong applicants from this ad, and we filled both open positions pretty quickly. Great!
A few weeks later, we were ready to hire for a different position. This time we needed a QA Engineer, aka QA Automation Engineer aka SDET. We've actually been trying to fill this position for over a year - it's the most difficult position we've tried to fill in over 10 years.
So with my newfound knowledge about the power of great job ads, I tried again. Rather than reuse the format of my previous success, I again did something different. I liked it, and again I got a lot of good feedback about the ad. I got an email from someone who wasn't interested in the job, but he just wanted to let us know that he loved the ad. Eugene Tech Jobs again posted great stuff about our ad, and they emailed us to let us know how much they've been enjoying our job postings.
Great! It's working again!
Whoa... Not so fast, cowboy... This time, we got almost no applicants. And I don't mean that we didn't get strong candidates - we got almost no applicants at all. Which is basically what we've seen in the past for this position. So the clever/funny/different job ad didn't work this time. Maybe it didn't work the last time either. Maybe we would have gotten all of those great applicants with a boring, standard job posting. It's difficult to know.
So what did I learn? Well, I learned that the tone of the job ad itself may or may not affect the pool of applicants. I learned that I enjoy writing clever/funny/different job ads more than I enjoy writing boring/standard job ads. And I learned that it's pretty freaking easy to set up a blog, but it's pretty freaking hard to come up with a name for it.