A Guide to Writing Job Descriptions to Attract Remote Developers
In a rapidly growing freelance industry, a job description is still the best way to find the right candidate. It’s how you write them that has changed.
Table Of Contents
The first step to writing a good job description (or JD for short) is understanding your target audience. Job boards have become relics of the past. The best remote developers no longer go searching for work. Instead, job descriptions get pushed directly to their inbox.
In-demand developers will receive hundreds a month, and as a result, they have learned to be selective. They ‘thin slice’ each job specification, comparing it against a mental checklist, and deciding in a matter of seconds if it’s worthy of their attention. The ones that aren’t, get ignored. To make sure your job description is being noticed, you need to change how you write it. This shift in how JDs are consumed can be easy to miss because, from an employer’s point of view, it can feel easier than ever to get applicants. If you’ve ever put up a role on Freelancer.com, for example, you’ve likely been bombarded with responses. The problem is that the quality of these replies can be very low.
If you’re looking for a junior developer to complete a simple, low-level task, then posting a basic job description on Freelancer or Upwork might be the best fit for you. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a talented technical candidate with strong communication skills who is ready to take on development of a core project area – then you’ll need to take a different approach.
That’s what I’ll be concentrating on in this article: walking you through each step to create an attention-grabbing job description that will attract top technical candidates.
Job Requirements
No one knows your role better than you do, so spend time thinking about how that role will be structured. Great developers think logically and clearly, so if your job description feels hurried and incoherent, it likely won’t resonate with them.
Stay Away From Hybrid Roles
Resist the urge to blend disparate roles together into what we call a ‘hybrid’ role. This is an easy trap to fall into. Let’s say you need a developer and a designer, but you don’t have the budget for both, so you try and blend both skill-sets into one job description. For example, “Searching for a full stack developer, who can also work in Photoshop and, ideally, is also great at SEM.” It’s a slippery slope…
