Dan Shapiro

Hacker News is an interesting lab for job postings.

It’s a target rich environment, so you know the right people are reading. Unlike many sites, you can’t pay to rank higher or show your headline in blue.  There’s no category search.  The rules are simple: if Y Combinator invested in you, you get your dozen words.  If they didn’t, you don’t get to post at all.  Best of all for our investigation, there are a lot of great minds tackling the problem (the problem being: how to get more great minds).

So I was surprised when I did a quick survey of the postings on news.ycombinator.com/jobs. Here were three representative samples of what I found.

Grouper seeks Product Engineer

Wheeee! There’s a company called Grouper! They’re seeking a Product Engineer! And… um, who’s Grouper? And why on earth would I click on this, unless I click on everything, because I am desperate?

It’s a shame the title’s so terrible, because if you do click through it, the job post is actually quite well written.

Come join FarmLogs in bringing the world’s farms online

Better! If you read their job description, they really want someone with passion around farming. While I don’t have demographic data, I’m going to guess that this is pretty unusual trait among the typical Hacker News clientele.

Now, they have an obvious omission – they didn’t mention who they were looking to bring onboard. From this title, it’s unclear if they’re hiring Ruby devs or door-to-door wormbed management software sales representatives.

But that’s OK. Because the goal of the title is not to inform, or promote, or educate: it’s to get the perfect person to click on it. And FarmLogs’ perfect person is going to say, “holy crap, a farm tech startup?” and click on the link out of outright curiosity if nothing else.

Android Hacker? Come take on the Telecom Giants

This is my favorite of the bunch. Given limited real estate, they prioritized wisely.  They tell the reader what kind of person will be a good fit.  They explain why the job is going to be different and interesting.  And they make it sound like an invitation to go on Gulliver’s Travels.  Of course, you can’t do that in a few dozen characters without cutting something.  So what did they cut?  Their company name.

Genius.

Their perfect candidate’s gonna smirk, imagine themselves as Jack/David/Sophie/Ender for a second, then click and find out the company anyway.

The Results

As of this moment, there are 22 jobs posted on the board.  I’m scoring them as follows:

List only your company and the title of the job you’re hiring for: 0 points

Do anything else at all: 1 point

Total score: 7/22

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