Effectively deliver your message when writing a job opening (part 2): the candidate profile

So you decided to hire people to work for your company or project, as did we. In a previous post we talked about identifying the target audience for your job opening, we'll now deal with the profile your ideal candidate should match.

Think about what you find really important

Instead of writing down a long list of required knowledge, to us how you work is more important. We like the getting-things-done mentality, but the quality of work delivered is equally important to us. It's mandatory you think about the design and architecture of software, and not just to start coding. Modularity, scalability, reliability and other -ilities will come back to haunt you if you don't pay attention to them. This is also the experience we were talking about earlier.

And of course we can't afford to ignore all of this, since this is the core of our business. We are a team of highly specialized experts providing real quality solutions to our customers. This is the way we work, but it's also who we are and how we are known in the market. So this is also our way to check if you'll fit in in the team, and match the philosophy of our company.

So when composing the ideal profile of our candidates, we don't list required knowledge of this or that framework. We do however provide some pointers that should give you as a candidate an idea of what knowledge we think is required to do the job we have in mind for you. Don't worry if you don't already know all of it, that's ok. But some topics at least should ring a bell, and ideally these are exactly the things you already knew a little bit, but always wanted to know more about. As a consequence, your ability and willingness to continuously learn is very important to us.

So think about what you find really important aspects for the profile of a candidate. It's easy to write and entire page of must-have knowledge and experience, it's much more difficult to bring a consistent message of what your requirements really are and at the same time effectively deliver your message as a future employer. It should breathe the culture and atmosphere of your company, and even this profile part of a job opening should offer a clear view what a candidate can expect when actually working in the company.

We'll talk about this perspective and what to think about when formulating your offer as an employer should in the next follow-up post.

Effectively deliver your message when writing a job opening

In case you didn't know yet, at Xume we have an job opening for Java experts. Senior developers or technical architects as well as young potentials are most welcome to contact us and find out if we can create the perfect job experience for each other.

As Xume consultants we are often involved in the process of hiring people for our customers, both in composing job profiles as well as in screening potential candidates. And we've also a lot of experience in analyzing what a customer is really looking for when we receive a request consultancy work formulated as a vacancy. But writing a job profile is not an easy task. Now we've written one down ourselves, we'll share some thoughts and tips on how to do it, and motivate the choices we've made.

So what do you have to think about when you want to write a vacancy to hire people? In this post we'll focus on identifying your target audience. Follow-ups will deal with key requirements, offering perspective to a candidate and finally some words about the selection procedure.

Identify your target audience
When writing a text in general, you always have to think about your target audience. This is especially important when writing a job vacancy. In our case, we deliberately chose to write a single job profile for both senior and more junior candidates. The motivation behind this is very simple: how will you distinguish between both?

We don't believe the age of a candidate or the years of work experience matters very much in our sector (IT). It's all about relevant experience, and you can have more relevant experience after one year of professional work than some other people have after ten years.

Another option is to list required knowledge of this or that framework. If you do so, be aware that you are defining criteria in terms of knowledge and not necessarily in terms of experience. This might be relevant if you actually need your candidate to bring specific knowledge aboard, or you don't want to invest too much in the education of your candidate, e.g. when hiring a consultant. But in our case we're hiring employees and we do want to invest in training and education, so the required knowledge boils down to knowing Java and JEE. We believe you as a candidate will acquire further knowledge quickly if you have relevant experience in general, when you are part of a team of experts and if you haven proven you're eager to learn.

In a follow-up post we'll talk about defining the key requirements for our ideal candidate. In the meantime do check our job opening, and if you know anyone that might be interested in joining us, please spread the word!