The right brief

When I first started looking around for jobs around a (long) while ago I was always perplexed why there was such an emphasis on X years experience in different tools and technologies. It was good to have a giggle about the request for 5 years experience in a system that had only existed for 2. And we've all seen the ads for someone with a raft of experience for less than money than you'd get filling shelves at a supermarket.

So I've written job descriptions not too far off that, even though in my own head I should know better - 4 years of this or 10 years of that. And they were never very effective. We ended up going through CV after CV that technically met the criteria but weren't right.

The best results always came from briefing agents and saying all the things that weren't on the job description - all the soft things that were really hard to write down, the real job description. I've worked with some stunning agents but the best of the best have always been the ones that knew the candidate and knew the job.

An answer should have been just to write down all those soft things as a job description that were being missing out on. But then I got no CVs through from agents. The annoying fact was that the tools those very good agents were using just didn't lend themselves to sort of tools that the agents were using to scrounge CVs in the first place.

The irony of all those thousands of job ads demanding x years experience is often because we can't describe accurately the sort of skills and experiences we actually want. As laughable as 20 years in .Net is or irrelevant as 10 years in mobile they are the shorthand we use for describing the sort of person we are after. Annoyingly, given this to work with the employment industry has optimised their tools for just this sort of vagueness and have done it admirably well.

We should be giving the agents a decent chance though - proper briefings, verbal or written, increase our chances of finding the right candidate with the right skills.