Tips on Great Job Descriptions for Software Development Managers

Check out the following tips on writing great job descriptions to see how to grasp your future employees’ attention.

Understand what technical people look for

In most cases, we should say, technical people are looking for the opportunity to keep up with the modern technology trends. Not only it is interesting for them, but it also helps to remain demanded on the market. An exception is “narrow” specialists, e.g. APL programmers: many of them prefer to stay with their specific skills and, thus, they are rather looking for better compensation or work conditions, but not for the technical challenges. Note that salary levels, job conditions, companies’ reputation – are all available on the Internet, so people normally understand pretty well, what they can get in terms of the compensation package. Therefore, except for the young people who are just starting their career and growing very fast, it is not a better compensation that is a driver for changing the job.

The shorter your description, the more interesting it is

We are in the Facebook era; people are used to reading short messages rather than exhaustive descriptions. We would not recommend creating job descriptions longer than one “page”, as people should be able to read it at once, without scrolling. In fact, writing a job description you as a software development manager should follow the “code” rule: the length of functions or methods in software code should not exceed one “page” to remain readable and digestible.

Mention necessary skills without overspecifying

The key point is to keep the whole story readable. Three lines of magic abbreviations are not “overspecification” but rather “something weird that nobody wants to get through”. Use bullets to structure the text, try to put no more than 1-2 “skills” in one line, and still fit the “one-page” length. Everything that does not fit this format perhaps could be skipped.

Keep in mind the audience specifics

One of the important things is to understand all particular features of your core audience. You should not expect essential differences in technical parts of the job description depending on the geographic area. However, generic requirements may vary significantly.

For example, in Ukraine senior University students often participate in real commercial projects, sometimes working 50 to 75 % of the time. It’s quite normal for companies here to look for someone who is about to graduate since such guys may already have 1-2 years of professional experience. In some countries, this practice is not common and may even look weird.

Another example: Infopulse constantly looks for especially challenging projects knowing that complicated tasks may attract talented people to join our team.

We’ve provided just a few sketchy pieces of advice for software development managers, which may be widened or modified in your discretion. Still, you shouldn’t forget about the common rules for creating great job descriptions. Try to strike the right balance and you will find a perfect employee. Would you like to read more field-proven tips from the Infopulse team? Stay tuned!