I need your help. I am asking you at the same time that I am asking the people you are looking for (job seekers). So here it is:
You have to fill a job for a Quality Assurance (QA) engineer. You know that one good thing about the job is that it is a great entry into the company. A lot of your field engineers come from the QA ranks. But you also know that the bad thing is that the QA management isn’t that good and that turnover is huge: greater than 50%, compared to your competitors, who keep over 90% of their QA engineers around but who don’t career track them into field opportunities as often as you do. Your company isn’t the biggest, and it isn’t the best (as determined by the Street) but you really do believe that your growth opportunities are superior to your competitors. (Let’s call the company CoolCo!.)
Now, here are two job descriptions you could post for the position:
CoolCo! is a rapidly growing and dynamic healthcare products and services companies. We make insulin pumps that save lives, and we hear from our customers every day the sort of difference that our products make in their lives. We ship the best product, and that starts with making sure that we make the best product. That’s where you come in. We need experienced Quality Assurance engineers who want to be a part of a rapidly growing and dynamic company that is making lives better.
Or...
Insulin pumps save lives. Since 1990 over 2 million people have experienced better quality of life because of this innovation. We didn’t invent the insulin pump, but we are trying to make people’s lives better through the pumps that we deliver. We are CoolCo!, a mid-sized and rapidly growing healthcare products manufacturer. Since good pumps start with great quality, we are putting a lot of effort into finding the right sorts of Quality Assurance engineers. If you are a QA engineer who is looking for an opportunity in the healthcare industry we ask that you check us out. But because we want to make sure that we start this relationship off right you should know that QA engineering at CoolCo! can be tough. The good news is that more of our QA engineers go on to careers in Field Engineering than our competitors, so you have a real career track here at CoolCo!. But in order to achieve that career track you have to put up with a rigorous work environment. Only the best QA engineers get to move up, and the rest tend to move out. It is a competitive environment.
So let me ask you...
Which one do you think would work best? Which one would you post, and what sorts of responses do you think you would get to each one? How would you evaluate success: the greatest number of resumes, even if many weren’t a fit, or a smaller number of applicants with most of them being a better fit for the position you were trying to fill?
I am hoping that we can get a real conversation going about this. And if you have any job descriptions that you have used that you think not only got great candidates but ended up in happy employees, I would love to see those too. Post them in comments (or a link to them) or send them to me at jjhunter at gmail dot com. Thanks!
