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We're sharing a guest blog post from our community EIR Danny Martinez, which is a guide for founders to use for creating a job description. This was previously shared as a post in the community here.
Hey EM, I’ve been helping earlier-stage founders with growth over the past few months and one of the common needs I’ve observed is transitioning from being founder-led to hiring for early-stage roles. This has also resulted in helping put together job descriptions for other roles, so I wanted to create a comprehensive post for founders to use as a guide for writing job descriptions.
To start with, early hires are critical, so it’s also important to invest time and effort into scoping compelling roles and job descriptions. Creating an effective job description is one of the most important things a founder can do to maximise their chances of finding a great candidate.
The job description should be thought about in the same way as a homepage: there is limited time to get the reader’s attention and they need to be quickly convinced that this is a product (in this case: a job) that requires further investigation. How can candidates be enticed with the opportunity and mission of the company?
To help address this in detail, I’ll break down what makes for a great job description with the following:
Before writing a job description, founders should ask themselves: "Do I have a clear understanding of what a dream candidate looks like, for this role and stage of the company". It might sound trivial, but I talk to many founders, where this isn’t clear quite far into the process (especially common if the role is in a function that isn’t the founder’s expertise).
I usually ask a few initial questions to figure this out:
After this, it’s important to clearly outline what the hard parts of this role will be.
For growth: is it someone experienced with a specific channel or versed in more foundational things like analytics or customer research? For engineering, is deeper research into a specialism needed; a product-focused engineer or someone that can get an MVP to show to investors? It’s now always clear-cut and can lead to high uncertainty with these hires. What to do in the face of this uncertainty?
Charchris Sloan, a founding engineer at Observe Technologies calls this: hiring the fuzz. Why? When growing a startup, there likely isn’t the need to exclusively hire in specialised areas: it’s fuzzy. It’s not super clear what a founder is looking for, and the risk of bringing in a wrong hire is high. There is an art to bringing in a candidate to learn 20% of their role: enough to get the current job done, but with the capacity to learn the rest. Alternatively bringing in outside expertise (in the form of fractionals or advisors) can shortcut this 20% learning. They can immediately give expert opinions and vet future candidates, ensuring startups avoid common mistakes.
Many guides claim to provide a definitive way of writing a job description. My take is that there isn’t a single "correct" way to outline a job description, there are many ways to do this effectively as long as it’s written from the perspective of a candidate who has come across this opportunity and startup for the first time.
With that in mind, here is how I would recommend structuring a job description to achieve the above goal:
The above ordering considers what a candidate will care about most from top to bottom. The overview of the opportunity and mission of the company is the part that gets their initial attention, the remaining bullet points are interesting but require the "initial sell" for candidates to be interested in investigating further.
The following are the basic sections for a job description and the details to include in each:
Job title
I’d recommend keeping this as simple as possible and aligning this to the core of the job. It might be tempting to use an overly fancy title to get initial attention, but if the actual job doesn’t back up the title, it’s unlikely to gather much interest. Early-stage founders can also benefit from leaving the seniority of the role slightly vague, to avoid over-committing to a seniority that may not be required right now, or which corners them for future hires.
Overview of the opportunity
What would excite a candidate about this role? What does a good outcome look like for them? How can they help to change the trajectory and help to achieve the overall mission, whilst learning things they would never be able to at a bigger company? A catchy enough opening paragraph is useful in getting a candidate excited enough to read the rest of the page.
Mission of the company
It’s easy to assume candidates will feel the same level of excitement as the founder, but it’s important to remember: this is likely the first time a candidate is coming across this company, they need to be sold on the mission and why they should feel excited about the change this company wants to make in the world
Core Responsibilities
What will a typical day look like for a candidate? Outlining this as simply as possible ensures that candidates can picture themselves in the role, which is the key thing that will get them to apply. Avoiding buzzwords, keeping it simple and trying to be as specific as possible are all things that can help a candidate conclude that this is the right role for them.
Required vs nice to have skills
This is a crucial part of the job description: distinguishing between what is required vs. a "nice to have" will prevent founders from turning away great candidates because they are not a "perfect fit" and will also prevent candidates from automatically ruling themselves out unnecessarily.
There may be candidates who might not tick every "nice to have" skill in theory, but with the right mindset and support, they will figure things out. A candidate with a strong growth mindset is constantly learning and is also happy to say, "I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out".
Compensation
It’s fairly common for candidates to go through an entire process, only to realise at the end, that the compensation expectations are misaligned. I can personally say that this is a highly frustrating experience on the candidate's side, and can so easily be avoided by sharing this information early on: in the job description.
Providing a range is fairly common, but I’ve also seen the approach to compensation described in the job description ensure expectations are aligned from early on. Some startups may choose to pay at the middle of the range in terms of salary but reward handsomely in terms of equity or vice versa. Being transparent about this early on in the process ultimately helps to save time for both the candidate and the startup.
Specifics on the role and process
Finally, ensuring other basics like location (if remote-friendly: timezone requirements) and salary expectations are clearly outlined can pre-empt many questions. Being upfront with candidates about how long they can expect a process to take from beginning to end is also good practice, whilst clarifying how many stages are in the process, and who they can expect to speak to are simple things that help the process get off to a good start.
Here are a few tips for each section and also referencing examples from job descriptions:
Job title
As an example, using "Lead" or "Head of" alongside a specialisation is something I’ve seen work effectively in previous roles. At Prolific, I essentially hired the first dedicated "sales" person, who would be tasked with scaling the function. In that example, we used "Sales lead" to acknowledge that this person would be building and leading the function, but with a view that a more senior salesperson (VP or C-level) may be required in future.
Overview of the opportunity
Here’s a great example from a role that was posted by Adi Thacker, when he was hiring for a Sr. Growth Marketing Manager at Poshmark:
This hits several of the points mentioned in the previous section: it gets the candidate excited about the role, shows the importance of it by describing the candidate as a "key leader" and talks about the potential impact this person will have with reaching "millions of sellers in the Poshmark community". Note how it isn’t a bland description of what Adi is looking for, instead, it looks at the perspective of the candidate and what would excite them instead.
Mission of the company
A good mission succinctly communicates the importance of the problem a company is aiming to solve effectively. Here are some examples I’ve seen from across the Everything Marketplaces community that have caught my attention:
Core Responsibilities
This Content and Product Marketing Lead role at Halo is a great example of both specific and simple to understand for a broad audience:
Required vs nice to have skills
A common theme that comes up here is seniority. It may be critical for a role, that a candidate has managed before, but it may be "nice to have" for them to have led a large group of people.
In a previous head of growth role at Prolific, the founders gave me access to a coach with many more years of experience in growing companies than I did, and led teams that were much larger than the one I was leading then. This coach accelerated my learning in a way that – in my opinion – can only otherwise be learnt on the job. Could they have hired a candidate with more leadership experience instead? - sure, but the reality was that these types of candidates were probably out of their price range.
It works similarly for engineering. In his founding engineer role, Charchris hired fractional specialists who were too expensive to hire full-time. This allowed the core team to focus on building products to reach key milestones. The team would then make judgement calls on how to expand specific functions, but the key point was to de-risk with an expert opinion as a baseline; then growing the "nice to haves" that tend to become "must haves" over time.
Compensation
A great example of compensation is Outschool with their transparency for the Staff Data Engineer role:
It’s unlikely that they’ll have any issues with candidates based on compensation, given how precise they have been at this very early stage. Note that there are very few companies that are this transparent, and I think it’s a missed opportunity and an easy opportunity for founders to stand out from the pack.
Specifics on the role and process
I recently came across Power, which does a very effective job of creating compelling job descriptions and in particular ensures they effectively deal with potential candidate objections head-on. See screenshots below for examples from one of their job descriptions:
(Note that every job description has an “FAQ” section that deals with objections)
In this section, I’ll outline some common mistakes founders should avoid, as well as some pro tips that have either worked well for me or I’ve observed working well in the past:
Crafting an effective job description is a crucial first step for founders looking to attract top talent. By focusing on the candidate’s perspective, founders can significantly increase their chances of finding their dream hires. Here are some key takeaways to remember:
Thanks to Charchris Sloan, a 0 to 1 founding engineer who recently exited his previous startup, Observe Technologies for providing his insights from a product/engineering perspective.
Also, thanks to Brendan Candon for the great post on team building & hiring, along with sharing the example VP of Finance scorecard for SidelineSwap.
You can connect with Danny to discuss this post in the Everything Marketplaces community here. A big thanks to Danny for also being an active EIR in the community, where he is often sharing his marketplace experience, insights, and helping early stage founders.
