Recruiting Graduates 2#: The Job Advert

For the previous blog see Recruiting Graduates #1

Our job adverts have been terrible recently with all kinds of inconsistencies between the adverts, and even some factual inaccuracies. 

For our Graduate recruitment drive in India, we put out an advert with the job title of:

“Fresher Hiring” 

Isn’t a “fresher” someone who is in the first year of university? It’s not someone who is about to graduate or has graduated. It should say the job title to be consistent with the other adverts, so: “Graduate Development Software Engineer“.

Also, it’s not listed under Graduate or Student categories either so you won’t find it using the filters; additionally it is under “IT & Telecoms” rather than “Engineering”.

 
So what are we asking for?

Requirements

Essential

n Academic Qualification: B.E/B.Tech, MCA with consistent academic performance from X, XII standards onwards.

n Experience: Freshers
n Good Analytical and Problem-solving skills
n Knowledge of Dotnet
n Good written and oral communication skills.
n Keen to learn and pick up new skills, passionate about software development, enthusiastic and innovative.

Do you love the letter “n”? well join us today because we would love to have you. Seriously, they are supposed to be bullet points, but somehow HR have used “n”s. I assume this is some lazy copy-and-paste and it hasn’t recognised the bullet points. If HR can’t be bothered putting a good advert out, then why would good candidates apply? It’s ridiculous.

Also back to the “Experience: Freshers” bullet point…

interview question:
HR: "what experience with freshers do you have?"
Candidate: "well, we all got drunk and had many nights of debauchery"

“Good Analytical and Problem-solving skills”,  “Good written and oral communication skills”, and “Keen to learn” are fairly generic qualities to put on a job advert but I actually think they are very appropriate for the job. 

“Knowledge of Dotnet” is debatable. I mean, the job is in C# so you do need “.Net”, but as explained in the previous blog, we are going for Graduates that are mainly using Java or Python. So we can’t say that it is essential – it’s actually “desirable”. Also, I think it is rare to see it written as “Dotnet” rather than “.Net” so we should be using the correct terminology and spelling. 

So even if they find the job advert, they might be put-off by the quality of it. The thing is, we have loads of developer and testing jobs available, in completely different team, products and locations. However, we don’t list the product or give information on the team (well 2 adverts had the name in the title; but it is meaningless to external candidates without a description) you are joining, so it’s impossible to separate seemingly duplicate listings. Furthermore, there is no consistency between the job titles or how we refer to the programming languages we are using. I think the term Software Development Engineer is a bit weird, and, until last year, I would have had no idea what SDE is an abbreviation for. If you were a developer, which job would you apply for out of these active listings?:
 

1. Fresh Hiring
2. Fresher Hiring
3. Fresher Hiring – SDE
4. SDE – .net
5. SDE – API Development
6. SDE – C# Dev
7. SDE Dotnet – Fresh Hiring
8. SDE (C#, SQL)
9. SDE – Team Crick
10. SDE – Team Crick C#/net and WPF
11. SDE – Frontend Developer
12. SDE – Dotnet Developer
13. SDE – dotNet & SQL
14. SDE – Dotnet
15. SDE – Dot Net Dev
16. SDE
17. Software Development Engineer
18. DotNet core Developer

Looking at a “Junior Software Development Engineer In Test” (yes, that really is the pretentious job title that Software Testers get these days), there were quite a few aspects of it that made me laugh. Let’s look at this: 

Jr SDET 

Essential
n Minimum + years of experience in a technical testing role.
n Strong knowledge of software testing approaches including agile testing techniques.
n Superb communication skills both written and verbal.
n Experience in driving UI testing down the stack and increasing robustness of the test infrastructure.
n Exposure to some aspects/phases of automation including GUI, integration testing, and performance/load testing.
n Moderate experience working with Product Owners and SMEs to define user story examples/acceptance criteria and exposure to Gherkin using tools like SpecFlow and Fitnesse.
n Some experience in understanding and testing complex enterprise systems architecture.
n Excellent MSSQL skills and understanding of complex XML structures.
n Good programming skills required in C#/Java.
n Good experience defining lightweight, high value test plans and tests.
n Experience defining and tracking test metrics throughout product development.
n Good experience mentoring and coaching Software Engineers in Test.
n Ability to drive the technical testing approach and guide less experienced department members
n Experience working closely with a team of software engineers and product owners.
n Good knowledge of scripting technologies such as PowerShell or Python.

So the “n” bullet points are here again. The opening line says they want “Minimum + years of experience“. Minimum plus years. Brilliant. 

“Experience in driving UI testing down the stack“. What the hell does that mean!?

Notice how we want experience in quite a few aspects, and good programming skills (in multiple languages!), but it is for a JUNIOR role, not a standard or Senior role. Then they want “Good experience mentoring and coaching” which is surely a Senior responsibility.

How do we expect to get many applicants with poor adverts which are hard to find on the website, then have formatting errors or other questionable content?