Why Engineers Hate your “Boiler Plate” Job Descriptions?

By [email protected] | August 21, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

How to Attract the most relevant applicants with great job postings

One of the main problems in SaaS/Software engineering hiring is the way job descriptions are written. While I knew this for some time (read years) The problem is, I was too lazy to change anything about it! That is until recently, one of the candidates I was interviewing for an Engineering Manager Role said this in our introductory call,

Me: Hope you’ve had a discussion with Ms.ABC (our HR) regarding the Roles and Responsibilities. If there are questions on it I can answer them, or we can get into the agenda.

Candidate: Yes I had a discussion with Ms. ABC. But, quite frankly it was your boilerplate JD. I’d actually want to understand what exactly I’d be doing. What will I be in charge of? What will I move?

Needless to say, I spent the next ~30 minutes walking through the current team structure, where he’d come in, what will he own, what the growth trajectory looks like etc. Ultimately, we did 2 more calls before both of us were satisfied that there are mutual synergies and went ahead. It made me reevaluate all of our Job Descriptions over the weekend and rewrote almost half of them to include factual details on projects, outcomes expected, tools available, glimpse of growth among other things.

After this, I asked the HR to send this “revised” JD to the candidates once again.

And the result was visible from Monday!

Either candidates that the HR thought super suited started dropping voluntarily from the process or candidates started expressing interest, doing more research on our stack, infra, product proposition and competitor benchmarking, before the call. Some even did a cold reach-out on Linkedin.

So, I wanted to share the small titbit here.

Why General Descriptions Don’t work?

Most Job descriptions barely resemble “specifications” at all, but feel more like generic stubs. Sort of like the equivalent of shopping for a car with as much details as “red and goes fast” or “black and built to last.”

It leaves too much open to the imagination for it to be a successful criterion to enable fitment. With criteria as broad as this you’ll end up spending an inordinate amount of time executing the search, since so many things appear to be a match. For me, Red and goes fast is always a 1971 Ford Mustang, for you it could be a 1998 Ferrari 365.

A Red Ford Mustang & a Ferrari 365, What do you Fancy?

A Black Dodge Ram and Jeep Cherokee, What do you Prefer?

The truth is that statements like the above — or its equivalent in engineering hiring — “Get me a backed dev with OOPS in Python/Java/Go with 5 years experience” — guarantee a similarly frustrating shopping experience. You’ve made it needlessly difficult for yourself and your HR/TA team to identify the specific talent you want. In this trite example you’ve indicated that you’re looking for a mid-level engineer that knows OOPS, but that basically includes everyone that ever graduated with a CS degree in the past 5 (to 10?) years. Surprisingly, many job “specifications” we see contain rarely any more info. These are the “Boiler Plate” Job Descriptions.

How did we find ourselves in this mess?

I understand why hiring managers do this. Sometimes they’re not exactly sure what they want — after all, it takes real time and effort to work out the specific vision for the role. But instead of acknowledging this and then solving the real problem (their own laziness), they delegate the JD writing to their Team/HR and it turns into generic tech JD. But the hiring manager is unfazed — “I’ll know the right candidate when I see them,” they say. Really? It could be true in some instances. Sometimes, we start with a Backend developer, then we come across a candidate with experience in building a full pipeline or a payment system. Then we expand the role to cover wider scope and evaluate against it. But generally, How will they know the right candidate if they can’t write down specifically what the candidate looks like?

Another reason for generic job specs is because a hiring manager is recruiting in a talent-constrained market (sound familiar?), and it feels like a smart move to cast as wide of a net as possible. Theoretically, one should be able to get more candidates into the top of the funnel this way, right?

Perhaps. Theoretically. But in my experience, this approach usually, and utterly, backfires. Here’s why:

Boiler Plate Job Descriptionsaren’t designed to appeal to any engineer in particular

In the current job market, engineers are faced with a wide variety of options from some amazing established companies and lots of seemingly “sexy” startups. (after “the great resignation”)

You need to take your opportunityto stand out! The more specific you are about the challenges a specific engineer will get to work in a specific role, the more traction you’ll get with (the right) candidates.

The idea is to make an engineer excited when you describe what they will “Get to do” in the first 12-15 months in the role.

Be very specific,

Talk about the product/modules they will own/drive/be part of,
Talk about the outcomes and metrics they will own and drive,
Talk about the toolchains & frameworks they’ll use (or get to choose),
Talk about What’s hard/challenging about the role, How are they a great fit.
The more details you can squeeze into the spec to help them visualize their role and the projects they’ll be working on the better.

Boiler Plate Job Descriptions don’t arm others to help you

Another bad thing about generic JD is that they don’t help others help you. Think of how much reach could you get by using everyone in your network as a recruiter. But in today’s scenario, “everyone else” is already asking them if they know any Python Engineers or React Developers or Go Engineers. Why would they help you? Because you’ve taken the time to get specific about what you want? Maybe.

Take a look at the following Job Description. Anyone in software engineering who had some deployment, infra-planning & communication seems to be a candidate for the role.

I recently got a request from a founder friend of mine to refer a Sr.Tech Lead/Engineering Manager for an early-stage startup. When I saw the JD, it was so generic it did not even have the primary stack on it. Assume sharing it from your handle. I politely declined to share it and asked for some more information and said will come back once he shares. (I believe he is very busy and hence hasn’t come back)

The bottomline is, Make them want to help you — give them a JD that’s so amazing, well-written, specific, (even entertaining) — that they can’t help but pass it on, post it, tell their friends about it, etc. If you make it stand out — you’ll get more attention from the folks that can help because you’ll arm them with something interesting & effective that they can use to reach out to their network.

Boiler Plate Job Descriptions don’t enable you to know what success looks like

This is a very simple point — see above — if you can’t explain what the ideal candidate looks like, how will you know when you’ve found them? The JD shared by my friend looks as vague as this.

Actually, his company was looking for a guy who could not just do Infrastructure Architecture. They wanted someone who has architected/built a cloud native SaaS application. His team has built the application and has no idea how to convert it to truly cloud native format to scale without breaking the bank!

The main idea here is about not being willing to settle for less. I realise the market is tough right now, and maybe you’ll need to make compromises. But do you want to start at the wrong end of the pool? When you go out the door with a generic description, you preemptively give up the battle. If you need to settle — fine! — but know exactly what points you’re compromising on.

The larger problem is that if you don’t know what the best candidate really looks like then the other people involved in making a decision likely don’t know what s/he looks like either. A well-defined, specific description of the role enables everyone involved in the interviewing and hiring process to be on the same proverbial page.

Now go get started!

Fixing your job descriptions will take some work(as I found out). To get to specifics, you’ll need to dig in and make additional efforts. You might also need to do some retraining in your organization and teach others these principles, too.

But when you get through the hard work, your postings will turn into valuable weapons that will,

a.) appeal to the engineers you want to reach,

b.) enable others to help you expand your outreach, and

c.) get your hiring team on the same page to quickly come to the right decision.

If you’re curious to see what roles we currently hire for, we have a lot of openings in Product, Design and Engineering:

It ranges from Kubernetes Architect, React Native Mobile Dev, Sr.Backend Dev, Tech Lead-Mobile Technologies, Engineering Managers, Associate Product managers, Product Managers etc.

More details can be had at https://angel.co/company/itilite-1/jobs or you can ping me 🙂

How to select SSO Standard for your SaaS Application.

By [email protected] | May 1, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

For anyone developing any application on the cloud, the major concern is always how is security implemented. Typically, you start with an authentication system viz. Usernames & Passwords. As your application grows in size of use cases and adoption, you’ll soon find a necessity to improve your security posture, these could range from MFA, Federated Identity management and finally authorisation. You now have customers who ask if you can support their AD authorisation or OneLogin or Okta etc.

This is when you’ll think about implementing a Single-Sign-On. But, the choice of how to keep data and identities secure begins much earlier for software architects and developers: selecting the standard that should be used to keep federated identities safe. This will involve two things, architecting an authorisation system – could be a separate service or bound with your application – this choice is critical to how you can grow as an organisation.

Architecture Choice:

If you choose to integrate it with your main product and 2 months later your board directs you to develop a new offering, you’ll end up doing it all over again. On the contrary, if you’re not going to pivot to any new business line, the additional time you will incur in building an external “Accounts service” will be a tax on the GTM.

Standards Choice:

IT Administrators and Security Architects must first choose the protocol or framework to use to maintain federated identity, or the mechanism of connecting a person’s electronic identity and attributes, safe while designing a plan to keep data and identities secure.

A Single Sign-On (SSO) account has the advantage of allowing employees to log in once to an application or network and not have to log in to several apps or networks during the workday. While this is beneficial to employees in terms of increasing productivity by eliminating the need to remember several passwords, it is also beneficial to IT and Security functions. The Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform responsible for maintaining employees’ credentials can assist make it more manageable by registering fewer passwords in the system.

It is, however, not an easy choice. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OpenID, and open authorization are the leading candidates in the federation process (OAuth). Let’s take a closer look at these technologies and determine when SAML, OAuth, and OpenID should be used.

What is Single Sign-On (SSO)?

SSO (Single Sign-On) is an authentication method that allows apps to validate users by using other trustworthy apps. Single sign-on allows a user to use a single ID and password to log into several applications.

SSO is an important part of an Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform for managing access. User identity verification is crucial for establishing what permissions a user will have.

SSO Standards

SAML

SAML is a protocol that allows an Identity Provider (IdP) to send a user’s credentials to a service provider for authentication and authorization. SAML allows for Single Sign-On (SSO) and streamlines password management. It is beneficial to businesses because employees are using an increasing number of applications to complete their tasks.

Keeping track of passwords for hundreds of programs used by hundreds, if not thousands, of employees can be difficult. SAML comes to the rescue by providing a single sign-on standard for businesses.

OAuth

OAuth 2.0 is a secure authorization standard. It allows secure delegated access by providing third-party services with access tokens rather than exposing user credentials. It does not, however, authenticate; it just authorizes.

You’ve probably used OAuth 2.0 if you’ve ever signed up for a new app and consented to allow it automatically source fresh contacts from Facebook or your phone contacts. This standard ensures that delegated access is secure. This means that a program can operate on behalf of a user and access resources from a server without the user needing to provide their credentials. This is accomplished by allowing the Identity Provider (IdP) to issue tokens to third-party apps with the user’s permission.

OpenID

The OpenID Connect (OIDC) standard is used for authentication. OIDC is used by identity providers (those who generate and administer identities) so that users can log in with their IdP first and then access applications without having to re-enter their credentials.

This authentication option is recognizable if you’ve used your Google account to sign in to apps like YouTube or Facebook to log into an online shopping cart. Organizations use OpenID Connect to authenticate users, and it is an open standard. This is used by IdPs so that users can sign in to the IdP and then use their sign-in information to access other websites and apps without having to log in or disclose their sign-in information.

SAML VS OAuth VS OpenID

OAuth 2.0 is a framework for regulating authorization to a protected resource, such as a program or a set of files, whereas OpenID Connect and SAML are both federated authentication industry standards. As a result, OAuth 2.0 is used in quite different situations than the other two protocols, and it can be used in conjunction with either OpenID Connect or SAML.

OpenID Connect is based on the OAuth 2.0 protocol and uses an ID token, which is a JSON Web Token (JWT) that standardizes areas where OAuth 2.0 provides for flexibility, such as scopes and endpoint discovery. It depends on user authentication and is often used to make user logins easier on consumer websites and mobile apps.

Unlike JWT, SAML does not rely on OAuth and instead relies on a message exchange to authenticate in the XML SAML format. It’s more commonly used in enterprise settings to allow users to log in to several applications with a single password.

Final Thoughts

As technology advances and systems become more interconnected, federated identification becomes increasingly useful since it is more convenient for users. It saves them time by reducing the number of accounts and passwords they have to remember, but it raises some security concerns.

SAML has one feature that OAuth2 lacks: the SAML token contains the user identity information (because of signing). With OAuth2, you don’t get that out of the box, and instead, the Resource Server needs to make an additional round trip to validate the token with the Authorization Server.

On the other hand, with OAuth2 you can invalidate an access token on the Authorization Server, and disable it from further access to the Resource Server.

SAML provides a simpler and more standardized solution which covers all of our current and projected needs at ITILITE and avoids the use of workarounds for interoperability with native applications.