Writing for hiring

Cassie joined Clearleft as a junior front-end developer last year. It’s really wonderful having her around. It’s a win-win situation: she’s enthusiastic and eager to learn; I’m keen to help her skill up in any way I can. And it’s working out great for the company—she has already demonstrated that she can produce quality HTML and CSS.

I’m very happy about Cassie’s success, not just on a personal level, but also from a business perspective. Hiring people into junior roles—when you’ve got the time and ability to train them—is an excellent policy. Hiring Charlotte back in 2014 was Clearleft’s first foray into hiring for a junior front-end dev position and it was a huge success. Cassie is demonstrating that it wasn’t just a fluke.

Alas, we can’t only hire junior developers. We’ve got a lot of work in the pipeline right now and we’re going to need a full-time seasoned developer who can hit the ground running. That’s why Clearleft is recruiting for a senior front-end developer.

As lead developer, Danielle will make the hiring decision, but because she’s so busy on project work right now—hence the need to hire more people—I’m trying to help her out any way I can. I offered to write the job description.

Seeing as I couldn’t just write “A clone of Danielle, please”, I had to think about what makes for a great front-end developer who uses their experience wisely. But I didn’t want to create a list of requirements, and I certainly didn’t want to create a list of specific technologies.

My first instinct was to look at other job ads and take my cue from them. But, let’s face it, most job ads are badly written, and prone to turning into laundry lists. So I decided to just write like I normally would. You know, like a human.

Here’s what I wrote. I hope it’s okay. I don’t really have much to compare it to, other than what I don’t want it to be.

Have a read of it and see what you think. And if you’re an experienced front-end developer who’d like to work by the seaside, you should apply for the role.