Hiring process part 1 · job posting

Arseni Mourzenko
Founder and lead developer
176
articles
February 28, 2019
Tags: hiring 15

When I worked as a free­lancer, one of the tasks I did was to help com­pa­nies hir­ing tal­ent­ed peo­ple. Aside the case of Melusyn start­up, I was most­ly han­dling the tech­ni­cal in­ter­views with the can­di­dates, and gave my ad­vice to the com­pa­ny: this can­di­date clear­ly lacks knowl­edge, while this one may have an in­ter­est­ing pro­file and should learn fast. Ob­vi­ous­ly, most small or medi­um-size com­pa­nies don't have skill­ful per­son­al who can han­dle an in­ter­view, ask tricky ques­tions, and not be­ing tricked by ig­no­rance dis­guised as clev­er­ness. With my help, those com­pa­nies could en­sure that they are not hir­ing quacks, but only peo­ple who ac­tu­al­ly know the stuff they are talk­ing about.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, those same com­pa­nies rarely han­dled cor­rect­ly the re­main­ing parts of the hir­ing process. Of­ten, they didn't know how and where to search for tal­ent­ed peo­ple, nor would they know how to in­ter­est the peo­ple they found. This caused an is­sue: when can­di­dates ar­rived at the stage where I had to in­ter­view them about their tech­ni­cal skills, near­ly all of them were un­skilled, in­ef­fi­cient pro­gram­mers who knew noth­ing about pro­gram­ming or de­vel­op­ment in gen­er­al, and not much about the lan­guage they used for ten years.

The se­ries of ar­ti­cles I start now is in­tend­ed to help those com­pa­nies un­der­stand­ing the prob­lems they can en­counter dur­ing the search for can­di­dates, and the so­lu­tions that may ex­ist.

Since I'm of­ten blamed to be too the­o­ret­i­cal in my ar­ti­cles, this se­ries will be based ex­clu­sive­ly on real-life ex­am­ples. Most­ly bad ones, to see what one shouldn't do, but also good ones, to serve as ex­am­ple.

Orig­i­nal­ly, I want­ed to start the se­ries by the very first thing which leads to a search for can­di­dates: the need. But, again, this would be too the­o­ret­i­cal, so in­stead of writ­ing a whole ar­ti­cle on that, let me just short­ly ex­plain what is it about be­fore I fo­cus on job post­ings.

The gen­e­sis of a po­si­tion

Be­fore you (CEO/hu­man re­sources man­ag­er) can tell your­self that there is a po­si­tion avail­able in your com­pa­ny, there should be a need. It is cru­cial to make the need ex­plic­it. This is not yet about mon­ey and op­por­tu­ni­ty: this is about the ac­tu­al is­sue you're en­coun­ter­ing: the need.

There are di­verse needs which might lead to a po­si­tion. The “we have some mon­ey so we can hire some­body” ap­proach, for ex­am­ple, is not based on a need, and will of­ten lead to fail­ure. You don't hire some­body be­cause you can; you hire him be­cause you cru­cial­ly need him.

Let's con­sid­er a few po­ten­tial needs.

As you can see, all those needs are prob­lem­at­ic. My point is not that you should nev­er hire, but that the de­ci­sion to hire is much more com­plex than a bunch of strict rules. But the fact that the de­ci­sion is com­plex doesn't mean that the need is as well.

The ben­e­fit of mak­ing the need ex­plic­it is to be able to con­sid­er al­ter­na­tives. It's not “I hire a de­vel­op­er be­cause I need a guy with strong data­base skills.”, but “I need a de­vel­op­er with strong data­base skills on this Java pro­ject, there­fore I can ei­ther hire some­one, or re­as­sign Jeff on this pro­ject or ask tem­po­rary help to a free­lancer Mary talked me about a week ago. Or I can mit­i­gate the prob­lem by not us­ing the ad­vanced data­base fea­tures, which will slow the pro­ject by one to two months.”

An ad­di­tion­al ben­e­fit is that even if you fi­nal­ly chose to hire some­body among oth­er al­ter­na­tives, you will be able to write a job post­ing more eas­i­ly, be­cause you know ex­act­ly why do you need to hire a per­son. Many peo­ple don't know what they need, and so they write lame job post­ings.

Writ­ing a job post­ing

My view on the sub­ject is rather rad­i­cal. Un­less you're an ex­treme­ly at­trac­tive com­pa­ny for tal­ent­ed peo­ple, such as FogCreek, Valve or Face­book, you don't have to write a job post­ing. At all. Don't waste your time. Tal­ent­ed peo­ple won't read it.

It's sim­ple to il­lus­trate through a sto­ry.

Fred is the best IT spe­cial­ist/Unix guru in the city—a sort of a guy any com­pa­ny wants to have. Fred has a job at This­Com­pa­ny­Sucks Inc.—a multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion which has a lot of mon­ey, but not a lot of re­spect for their most valu­able pro­fes­sion­als.

For ex­am­ple, Fred just had an ar­gu­ment with his man­ag­er: he tried to ex­plain to the man­ag­er some tech­ni­cal as­pects which should be done on in­fra­struc­ture lev­el be­fore switch­ing the new servers to pro­duc­tion, but this man­ag­er nev­er lis­tens; “the servers should be up and run­ning to­mor­row evening”—he shout­ed be­fore slam­ming the door.

Such sit­u­a­tions be­came too fre­quent to push Fred to search for a new job. So he vis­its the web­site of Bliz­zard, be­cause he en­joys the spir­it in this com­pa­ny and knows that they have a sub­sidiary in the neigh­bour town. Fred doesn't find any­thing cor­re­spond­ing to his pro­file, so he takes a look at a few web­sites of large soft­ware ven­dors and large sci­en­tif­ic or­ga­ni­za­tions. Noth­ing there ei­ther. Once the work day is fin­ished, Fred goes to a bar with his friends and asks them if they know about any po­si­tion. One sug­gests a small com­pa­ny: his sis­ter works in this com­pa­ny as an ac­coun­tant, and she heard their sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tor is leav­ing in two months.

The next day, Fred calls this com­pa­ny. The CEO is clear: the com­pa­ny wouldn't be able to pay the same salary as Fred has at his cur­rent job, but they would make him the only per­son who takes tech­ni­cal de­ci­sions re­lat­ed to in­fra­struc­ture. Two months lat­er, Fred leaves his cur­rent job for this new op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Most pro­fes­sion­als act the same way. They have in mind three-four com­pa­nies they want to work for, but they won't go look at job post­ings of your com­pa­ny, be­cause this com­pa­ny is not the one they dream of. On the oth­er hand, “the per­son who knows some­one who knows this tal­ent­ed guy”-style chains work well and this is the thing you should cap­i­tal­ize on. This means that:

— But wait, we still need a job post­ing to for­mal­ize the fact that we are search­ing for a per­son!—in­ter­rupts a CEO from the au­di­ence.

— Un­less you're in pub­lic sec­tor, you don't. You can't for­mal­ize a per­son. Are you wor­ried about ac­count­ing? They don't care un­til you hire the per­son. Are you wor­ried about be­ing clear about the pro­file you're look­ing for?

— Ex­act­ly, I don't want mis­un­der­stand­ings be­tween me and the po­ten­tial can­di­dates, and the so­cial chains in­crease the risk of mis­un­der­stand­ing.

— OK, now we got some­where. You need a job post­ing to make things clear. What would you in­clude in the job post­ing, i.e. what ex­act­ly should you ren­der clear and ex­plic­it?

— The tech­nolo­gies the per­son should know.

— You cer­tain­ly don't want to do that. Be­cause you ac­tu­al­ly want to hire Fred, the Unix guru, even if your servers are un­der Win­dows. Sim­ply be­cause Fred will spend a few weeks learn­ing some sub­tle­ty of Win­dows and be near­ly op­er­a­tional mean­while, while Joe—the op­po­site of Fred, al­ready knows how to ad­min­is­ter Win­dows ma­chines, but will be stuck for months when you'll need con­fig­ure your switch­es to sup­port LACP.

— Well, if I need a Java de­vel­op­er, why would I in­ter­view some­one who worked ex­clu­sive­ly with .NET?

— Be­cause this .NET guy has al­ready the knowl­edge you need—a knowl­edge of de­vel­op­ing large-scale ap­pli­ca­tions, a knowl­edge of writ­ing re­li­able code, a knowl­edge of work­ing in a team, a knowl­edge of un­der­stand­ing the re­quire­ments and the busi­ness rules. Learn­ing a pro­gram­ming lan­guage is noth­ing com­pared to the path re­quired for a pro­gram­mer to be­come a de­vel­op­er. This .NET guy is un­able to ex­plain the dif­fer­ence be­tween checked and unchecked ex­cep­tions? I couldn't care less. He en­coun­ters the term “checked ex­cep­tion”, Googles it, reads an ar­ti­cle, and voilà, five min­utes lat­er he knows the dif­fer­ence. But when the Java pro­gram­mer doesn't un­der­stand why does it mat­ter to have a com­mon code style or when he takes every code re­view too per­son­al­ly, there is noth­ing he can Google.

— In my ex­pe­ri­ence, pro­gram­mers tend to learn new lan­guages much more painful­ly than that, and it cer­tain­ly takes longer than a few weeks to be­come skill­ful in Java.

— Pro­gram­mers, maybe. But I'm talk­ing about de­vel­op­ers, and specif­i­cal­ly about tal­ent­ed peo­ple. They al­ready know a few lan­guages, and learn­ing an ad­di­tion­al one is not as dif­fi­cult as it looks like. Per­son­al­ly, I hard­ly have an ex­cel­lent lev­el in pro­gram­ming lan­guages, but it took me a few weeks to be pro­duc­tive in Python enough to be able to work on a large-scale pro­ject. Giv­en that I work alone, with no code re­views, so I may miss a few things. A per­son well-in­te­grat­ed in a team will not have this draw­back I have. Af­ter 7 years of .NET, Mi­crosoft SQL and Win­dows, I sud­den­ly switched to Node.js, Python, Mon­goDB, Re­dis and Lin­ux. Was it scary? To­tal­ly. Was it worth it? Com­plete­ly. You see, a few weeks lat­er, I was al­ready writ­ing pro­duc­tion code, the one which is test­ed and refac­tored.

— Ok, what about the ac­tu­al job ti­tle? If I'm look­ing for a DBA, I don't need can­di­dates who are just de­vel­op­ers, right?

— Let's talk about job ti­tles. Many don't make any sense. They are in­vent­ed by peo­ple from HR who know noth­ing about IT, and they are only use­ful for peo­ple from HR. I don't un­der­stand many of the ti­tles, sim­ply be­cause they have no mean­ing. They talk about De­vOps ex­pert when they ac­tu­al­ly search for a sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tor. My last job was called “An­a­lyst-pro­gram­mer in R&D de­part­ment”: what I ac­tu­al­ly did was cod­ing. A mon­key could do half of the stuff I did. Any un­der­grad in­tern could do the re­main­ing work. But let's imag­ine you're great at in­vent­ing job ti­tles, and you do it right, with the right terms, and every­body mag­i­cal­ly knows the ac­tu­al mean­ing of those terms. You do the same for cri­te­ria. Would this help? I don't think so. You're search­ing for peo­ple, not ma­chines. When I want to buy a new cam­era, I may in­di­cate that I need a DSLR (job ti­tle) which can shot 4K movies at 25 fps (cri­te­ria). I don't need a mir­ror­less cam­era: I need a DSLR. I don't need a cam­era which can't shot 4K movies or which shots 4K movies at a max­i­mum of 24 fps. I sim­ply don't. When it comes to peo­ple, the same ap­proach doesn't work. You may want to hire a front-end de­vel­op­er who is par­tic­u­lar­ly skill­ful in CSS 3, but then, dur­ing an in­ter­view with Stephen, you un­der­stand that he may lack some skills in CSS 3, but gosh, he's an ex­cel­lent team play­er and knows so much of JavaScript stuff that you would be fool­ish not to hire him. This is also a prob­lem with most hir­ing web­sites. They like cat­e­gories, tags, clas­si­fi­ca­tion, fil­ters, key­words. But tech­niques which work well on an e-com­merce web­site don't work when the prod­uct is a hu­man be­ing. This is also a prob­lem of dat­ing sites. I can do a search for a brunette aged from 24 to 26 who likes pho­tog­ra­phy and doesn't smoke, but would it mean that I will nev­er ever fall in love with a fat neigh­bor girl who hates pho­tog­ra­phers, smokes and en­joys gaz­ing at stars sit­ting on the roof of her house at night?

— So if I get you right, tech­ni­cal as­pects don't mat­ter?

— Not that they don't mat­ter. You won't in­ter­view a DBA for a job of a front-end de­vel­op­er, and you won't in­ter­view a pro­gram­mer who spent all his life de­vel­op­ing video games in C for a job of a busi­ness an­a­lyst. But you don't need a for­mal job post­ing for this sort of in­for­ma­tion. If your ac­coun­tant tells her sis­ter that you're look­ing for a DBA, her sis­ter knows that her JavaScript skills won't help get­ting this spe­cif­ic po­si­tion in your com­pa­ny. Even in an event of a mis­take, this is not too se­ri­ous. Ac­tu­al­ly, see­ing a per­son for a wrong job can even give you some ideas. The per­son may even know some­body who cor­re­sponds much bet­ter to your needs.

— What about the non-tech­ni­cal skills? Wouldn't it be use­ful to put non-tech­ni­cal skills on a job post­ing? You told about Stephen who is an ex­cel­lent team play­er. What about a job post­ing which spec­i­fies that you need some­body who is able to work in a team?

— This is prob­a­bly the most use­less part of job post­ings. Can­di­dates should be mo­ti­vat­ed, be able to work in a team, be pro­fes­sion­al, be pro­duc­tive, bla bla bla. This is just bor­ing. Of course I'm not mo­ti­vat­ed, I am un­able to work in a team (as well as to work alone), I hate my job and IT in gen­er­al, I hate talk­ing to peo­ple, I can't stand re­ceiv­ing or­ders and I also can't take re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, I'm un­able to be or­ga­nized, I'm al­ways late at work, please, please, would you hire me? Nev­er put in a job post­ings things which are too dif­fi­cult for a can­di­date to say no to. “Are you mo­ti­vat­ed?”—“No, I'm not.” “Are you ready to learn new things?”—“What?! I hate learn­ing!”

— So you'll nev­er write any job post­ing?

— I will. But with a dif­fer­ent goal.

The real goals of a job post­ing

The ac­tu­al goals of a job post­ing are:

The sec­ond goal is ac­tu­al­ly the most im­por­tant one. I men­tioned the first one, but I'm not con­vinced that you get a lot of can­di­dates this way. On the oth­er hand, you get a lot of peo­ple who you don't want to hire. If you get too much re­quests that your RH de­part­ment is over­whelmed, they may not be able to an­swer to every­one, and this can lead to a neg­a­tive im­age of your com­pa­ny (and de­press the des­per­ate can­di­dates as well).

Let's fo­cus on the sec­ond goal. When peo­ple are read­ing the job post­ing, they want to know:

This is es­sen­tial­ly the key to suc­cess­ful job post­ing, the one which will at­tract the per­sons you want in your com­pa­ny in­stead of scar­ing them away.

Once you un­der­stand that, it makes it fun­ny to read the ac­tu­al job post­ings writ­ten by av­er­age sec­re­taries with no tech­ni­cal back­ground (and no writ­ing skills as well) for av­er­age com­pa­nies. Let's study one of such post­ings: So­gia Sys­tème, Bor­deaux, is cur­rent­ly look­ing for a pro­ject man­ag­er. It's in French, but I'll at­tempt to trans­late it.

Ex­am­ple 1

Ti­tle: PRO­JECT MAN­AG­ER

Start­ing by shout­ing at peo­ple is not a good way to in­tro­duce the job post­ing. Is there any rea­son to use all cap­i­tals?

De­scrip­tion:

pro­ject Man­ag­er
5 years ed­u­ca­tion
suc­cess­ful ex­pe­ri­ence of 3 to 5 years as per­son in charge of ap­pli­ca­tion.
re­port­ing tools such as OBIEE.
third-par­ty ref­er­en­cial " Links ".
tree cus­tomers.
CRM cus­tomers.
En­sure the dai­ly mon­i­tor­ing of those ap­pli­ca­tions :
Es­ca­late is­sues with their busi­ness im­pact.
Par­tic­i­pate in the prepa­ra­tion and pro­ject or streer­ing com­mit­tees, es­ca­late process or ap­plica­tive im­prove­ments jus­ti­fied by a busi­ness ROI.
Per­form the clean­ing and en­rich­ment of data­bas­es.
Pro­vide user sup­port.
Doc­u­ment and per­form the nec­es­sary pro­ce­dures.
Cre­ate re­port­ings around the cus­tomer/tree, sup­port the cus­tomer in­for­ma­tion cen­ter, es­pe­cial­ly for mar­ket­ing.
En­sure a per­ma­nent tech­no­log­i­cal mon­i­tor­ing in the evo­lu­tion of your do­main.

Type: per­ma­nent

Start date: asap

Lo­ca­tion: BOR­DEAUX

So, re­mem­ber the goal: to pre­sent your­self, your com­pa­ny and the con­text. Is the per­son pre­sent­ing her­self? Well, sort of. We know the au­thor has dif­fi­cul­ties in writ­ten ex­pres­sion, but we don't know his role in the com­pa­ny. What about the com­pa­ny? Nope, not a thing (ex­cept that they hired a per­son who can­not ex­press his ideas clear­ly and let this per­son pub­lish job post­ings). What about the con­text? Not a clue.

What do we know? We know that they are look­ing for some­one who spent 5 years in col­lege, the rea­son re­main­ing un­known. The next lines of the post­ing make no sense, so it's dif­fi­cult to tell any­thing from them. What is a “per­son in charge of ap­pli­ca­tion”? Why is the per­son sud­den­ly talk­ing about Or­a­cle Busi­ness In­tel­li­gence? What are those ref­er­en­tial links? Why are they hang­ing their cus­tomers on a tree? That's scary. Fol­lows a bunch of tasks the un­for­tu­nate can­di­date will have to do. Among them, the clean­ing of the data­base. Wait, what? Pro­ject man­ag­er. Clean­ing of the data­base. WTF?!

How the whole process of com­pos­ing such de­scrip­tion hap­pened? Was it an ac­tu­al per­son who ei­ther con­sumes drugs or has some sort of dis­abil­i­ty who did that? It is un­der­stand­able that the sec­re­tary didn't have a clue about OBIEE or the es­ca­la­tion of is­sues, but why would this per­son ac­cept writ­ing that? Why wouldn't he or she walk down the of­fice and ask their DBA: “Please, can you write the job post­ing for me?” What hap­pened to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion in this com­pa­ny if the sec­re­tary can­not ask a sim­ple thing to a DBA, or to any of the de­vel­op­ers?

Fi­nal­ly, why are they giv­ing this task to a per­son who ob­vi­ous­ly is un­able to write, a per­son who doesn't know that “ASAP” is an ab­bre­vi­a­tion and should be writ­ten in all cap­i­tals, while “Bor­deaux” is the city, and should be only cap­i­tal­ized?

The job post­ing doesn't an­swer any of those ques­tions. In­stead, it gives a very bad im­age of the com­pa­ny which be­comes even worse when we read on the front page of their web­site: “Our strat­e­gy: be­ing a rec­og­nized dis­cov­er­er of tal­ents; fol­low each tal­ent to­wards ex­cel­lence; [...]”. Why are they de­cid­ing to throw away all their mar­ket­ing with a sim­ple job post­ing? Why would they de­cide to de­stroy their im­age by putting side by side the claim that they are a “rec­og­nized dis­cov­er­er of tal­ents” and the ac­tu­al job post­ing show­ing that they have no clue about any­thing re­lat­ed to hir­ing and have deep com­mu­ni­ca­tion is­sues in­side their com­pa­ny?

Let's look at an­oth­er ex­am­ple.

Ex­am­ple 2

Sal­si­ta, a com­pa­ny in Prague, Czech Re­pub­lic, is cur­rent­ly search­ing for a re­mote JavaScript soft­ware de­vel­op­er and pub­lished a job post­ing on Ca­reers.SE. Note that Ca­reers.SE has a spe­cif­ic for­mat in three parts which pre­vents fol­low­ing the three goals I de­scribed above.

Job De­scrip­tion

Sal­si­ta fo­cus­es on the rapid­ly grow­ing area of JavaScript soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing: build­ing com­plex soft­ware ar­chi­tec­tures us­ing JavaScript for our in­ter­na­tion­al clients. This in­cludes:

  • So­phis­ti­cat­ed mod­ern web­sites us­ing An­gu­lar­JS and oth­er pop­u­lar frame­works
  • Scal­able back­ends us­ing Node.js (we also use Python, Java and oth­er lan­guages for some pro­jects)
  • Portable mo­bile apps us­ing Phone­Gap (we also do na­tive iOS de­vel­op­ment)

We are seek­ing ex­pe­ri­enced JavaScript soft­ware de­vel­op­ers to join our team and work re­mote­ly along­side our world-class en­gi­neers. You will work on in­ter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing pro­jects for clients in the Unit­ed States, Eu­rope and around the world. Our de­vel­op­ment process is based on scrum and uses best of breed tools like Piv­otal Track­er, Github, Re­view Board, Cir­cle­CI and Slack. We have a heavy em­pha­sis on qual­i­ty, with manda­to­ry peer code re­views for every line of code we write, and a ded­i­cat­ed qual­i­ty as­sur­ance team re­spon­si­ble for man­u­al and au­to­mat­ed test­ing.

They got it right from the be­gin­ning. The de­scrip­tion of the com­pa­ny is here; more­over, they ex­plain why is this a great com­pa­ny to work for: world-class en­gi­neers, in­ter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing pro­jects, Agili­ty, em­pha­sis on qual­i­ty, code re­views, QA team. I don't see what else I could ask (giv­en that the po­si­tion is re­mote, so most points from Joel Test don't ap­ply here).

Skills & Re­quire­ments

  • Strong foun­da­tion in soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing (prefer­ably uni­ver­si­ty de­gree or equiv­a­lent)
  • Sev­er­al years of pro­fes­sion­al ex­pe­ri­ence pro­gram­ming in JavaScript
  • Thor­ough un­der­stand­ing of JavaScript con­cepts in­clud­ing pro­to­typ­i­cal in­her­i­tance, clo­sures, vari­able scope/hoist­ing, etc.
  • Ex­pe­ri­ence de­vel­op­ing sin­gle-page web ap­pli­ca­tions, prefer­ably us­ing An­gu­lar­JS
  • Ex­cel­lent writ­ten Eng­lish and good spo­ken Eng­lish
  • Strong com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­ter­per­son­al skills

Be­cause this is a re­mote po­si­tion, you must have the ap­pro­pri­ate com­put­er hard­ware and in­ter­net con­nec­tion.

As I ex­plained, list­ing tech­ni­cal and non-tech­ni­cal skills is usu­al­ly prob­lem­at­ic, but Ca­reers.SE en­cour­ages that, and to be hon­est, their list seems fair. They don't re­quire can­di­dates to be mo­ti­vat­ed or pro­duc­tive. They keep their re­quire­ments at a min­i­mum, and clear­ly ex­plain what they need.

About Sal­si­ta

Sal­si­ta is a suc­cess­ful, fast-grow­ing soft­ware de­vel­op­ment con­sul­tan­cy head­quar­tered in Prague with a sales and mar­ket­ing of­fice in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Our mis­sion is to cre­ate top-qual­i­ty cus­tom soft­ware so­lu­tions for our in­ter­na­tion­al clients. We are ded­i­cat­ed to con­tin­u­ous im­prove­ment of our ag­ile de­vel­op­ment process and use of the lat­est tech­nolo­gies and tools. We are con­stant­ly ex­per­i­ment­ing with new lan­guages and tech­nolo­gies in­clud­ing Cof­fee­Script, Type­Script, Re­act and var­i­ous func­tion­al lan­guages for back­end de­vel­op­ment.

In our busi­ness a com­pa­ny lives and dies on the qual­i­ty of its team, and we of­fer every ben­e­fit we can think of to at­tract the best soft­ware de­vel­op­ers avail­able. In ad­di­tion to our core de­vel­op­ment team in Prague, we are build­ing a net­work of se­lect re­mote de­vel­op­ers around the world who have the skills and ex­pe­ri­ence to com­ple­ment our ex­ist­ing en­gi­neers.

Ex­cel­lent, well-writ­ten de­scrip­tion. They re­peat a few things they've al­ready told in the first part, but it doesn't look repet­i­tive. This job post­ing gives an im­age of a sol­id com­pa­ny which looks for skill­ful peo­ple to cre­ate high-qual­i­ty soft­ware and to work on chal­leng­ing pro­jects.

Back to the goals, they achieved to pre­sent the com­pa­ny (bonus points for an ex­cel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion) and the con­text. What about the per­son I will talk with? Well, Ca­reers.SE makes it dif­fi­cult to ex­plain that, but giv­en the job post­ing, I'm pret­ty sure that a can­di­date will be in­ter­viewed by an en­gi­neer or some­body ele who is ac­tu­al­ly able to de­ter­mine the skills of the per­son.