My number one learning from hiring about 300 people is that job descriptions are a product, and that good products are much easier to sell. I've seen rewriting a job descriptions leading to one to two orders of magnitude more candidates. This allows you to quickly spot trends on what makes for an ideal candidate profile, which allows your to update your job description and sourcing accordingly. It's easier to show what's a good job description than to explain the principles behind it, so you'll find examples below. ## JS Engineer before and after Here's a real example of how this engineering role went from getting ~10 to ~300 candidates a week after a 10' rewrite. Note the "before" description was already much better than the average job description out there. Some quick principles: - Make the title stand out - Show don't tell - Remove every instance of corporate BS ### Before #### Senior JavaScript Engineer #### **👋 About Us** Engineering teams accelerate 2-5x through GitStart. Our vision is to provide a global technology platform for developers and engineering teams to work together harmoniously. As a developer at GitStart, you will primarily work to scale the engineering teams of our global clients while leveraging the community of talented engineers to grow professionally through detailed product and technical reviews, stellar code reviews, and a collaborative work environment. that's 100% remote. #### **💼 About the Role** We’re looking for an experienced Senior JS developer to help with a commercial instance with a high volume of tickets. #### **🔥 Key Responsibilities** - Design and develop advanced applications utilizing React.js and Next.js frameworks. - Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to conceptualize, design, and implement new features. - Integrate with external data sources and APIs to enhance application functionality. - Implement comprehensive unit tests to ensure code robustness, including handling edge cases and enhancing usability. - Identify and resolve bugs while continuously optimizing application performance. - Stay updated with emerging technologies, evaluating their potential to enhance development efficiency, and incorporating them into projects. **Nice-to-Haves:** - Knowledge of other programming languages like Vue and GO, enhancing versatility in development tasks. - Exposure to a broad number of industries and able to onboard to a wide range of app/website development, understanding various domain challenges and requirements. #### **😊 About You** - Strong team player, comfortable collaborating with diverse teams and stakeholders. - Excellent analytical skills and effective time management abilities. - Meticulous attention to detail, committed to delivering high-quality, maintainable code. - Agile learner, capable of quickly adapting to new technologies and evolving project demands. - Innovative thinker, capable of proposing creative solutions to complex problems. #### **⛳️ Compensation, Perks & Benefits** - 100% remote with flexible working hours - Competitive earning offer starting from $1500/month (with potential to increase based on level) - Quarterly performance based-increases - Join a community of brilliant minds - Community events and meets ups ### After #### Senior Engineer - JS - Career Accelerator TLDR: join a career accelerator for developers by developers. Alumni have joined companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google or founded their own. #### 💼 About the Role GitStart is a community of developers that turns tickets into PRs for YC startups to unicorns. Top 7 reasons to join: - **🌱 Grow your skills -** Write and review code from day one, get daily review from peers and senior/staff engineers, join technical/PM/communication growth tracks - **🌍 World class codebases** - condense decades of learnings into years by learning from small codebases of fast growing startups and those of unicorns with best practice docs, CI/CD, review envs, etc - **🤖 Become AI native** - get access to all new AI development tools as they come out, from GPT-4 to agents that auto-create tickets based on your PR comments - **💳 Earn based on your skills** - get harder tasks as you grow, which unlock XP that automatically translates in a higher pay (start at ~$18k/year, grow to $55k). - **👩‍💻 Fully remote and async -** work when you want, where you want, and how you want. No micromanaging. - **🚀 Gain open source experience -** Get paid to contribute to world-class open source repos and build your brand (hundreds of PRs merged across Chromium, Firefox, Elastic, etc) - **🤝 Build lasting connections** - bond with people from 15+ countries, across game nights and local events #### 🎯 Key Responsibilities - Write great code - Give thoughtful reviews - Help your teammates maximize their potential #### 😊 You’re A Fit if - You are versatile with knowledge of other programming and frameworks like Vue and GO. - You are accountable and take extreme ownership of your work. - You are a team player Ready to do the best work of your life? Contact us here. ## Growth role People don't care about what the hiring committee cares about as much as what's in it for them: will their work be meaningful, does the company have potential, who will they get to work with. This job description aimed at tackling this. ### (GitStart) Founding Growth / Tech Founder ➡️ GTM You're the no. 1 priority hire🏅! The product sells itself (75%+ conversion upon trial, 2 days in a row on HN frontpage, ProductHunt Product of the day), clients spend in the 6 figures yearly and we have millions in the bank to fix the bottleneck: getting demos! This means you’ll get - Unlimited budget to accelerate yourself with tools and contractors - Headcount to scale successful experiments (1-2 people ASAP for each new channel) - Unlimited support from all teams and mentorship from veterans from successes like Figma ◯˚GitStart is a technical product so you must have written code professionally and/or marketed devtools before. Also, remote is welcome! Here’s a bit about GitStart before diving into the role: ### **Change Lives** Our mission is to give everyone a chance to change their life with code, no matter where they’re from. We let promising engineers get real-world experience by working on our client apps, which allows our clients to turn more of their ideas into reality. And it’s working: - Our alumni got into Amazon, Facebook, and Google, and star developers include Afghan women who lost their right to learn and work with the Taliban. - Our clients have built entire apps and tackled daunting tech debt with help from GitStart alone. More the story [here](https://gitstart.com/blog/seed-fundraising). ### **Backed by the world’s best** We are supported by the best investors in our field, Neo, YC, Bonfire VC, and the world’s best engineering leaders: - Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott - Google VP Parisa Tabriz - [Code.org](http://code.org/) CEO Hadi Partovi - Instagram VP Maria Zhang - Director of Google Bard Jack Krawczyk - Circle CTO Li Fan - Airbnb founder Nate Blecharczyk - Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi - Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo - Andela founder Iyinola Aboyeji - Gigster founder Debo Olaosebikan - Replit CEO Amjad Masad - Former Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer - And more ### **Join an amazing team** #### Team includes: 🔥 >50% former founders, many of mission driven organizations like mPharma (Africa’s best health tech startup, 1k people $100m raised) and CodePhenix (Europe’s largest coding bootcamp for inmates) 🧑‍🔬  Patents holders 🧠 A national math olympiad winner and former Typescript team member 🌍  ~16 nationalities for ~20 people 🤫 And more: a published poet, a sailing world champion, a cricket team coach, two musicians drawing hundreds for concerts, etc. Also, the number one thing newcomers notice is that people are truly kind 😇. More on this when we meet! ### For this role specifically, you’ll mostly be working with: - **Corentin**, Revenue - turned around a business as Chief Growth Officer, 7th hire at [Doctrine.com](http://doctrine.com/) (acquired), background in high level sports ([more here](http://corentintrebaol.com/)) - **Damien**, Sales - 4y in sales as US General Manager, Head of Sales, and GTM advisor - went from scratch to closing logos like IBM and J&J, 4y in strategy consulting - **Andreea**, Product - 5y experience in leading product from seed to unicorn, 2y as a software engineer and 7y as a marketer at one of the world’s top marketing agencies! ([more here](https://andreea.xyz/)) - **Hamza**, Client Engineering - early Typescript team member at Microsoft, 4y as staff engineer @ YC backed startups, Pakistan Maths Olympiad winner ### **Your mission** Your mission is remove the bottleneck on growth, aka to get so many people to try the product or book demos that together as a team, we can grow tens of thousands of aspiring engineers across the globe, gather millions of diffs to train AI models, and build a meaningful success story. Concretely, you will: - **Craft experiments** that convert across multiple channels (we started finding traction with emailing, tech newsletters, and want to test new channels) - define targeting, write copy when applicable, and scale the winners - **Analyze data** to understand what’s working and what’s not - from writing SQL (we log absolutely everything imaginable) to reading through customer interactions - **Build a team** to accelerate and complement yourself On top of the classic stuff, we’d love to have fun launching creative experiments inspired by delivering [champagne](https://twitter.com/samdblond/status/1612518983726424080), [AirPods Max](https://www.qawolf.com/lp/qa-wolf-test-automation-challenge), and [industrializing writing letters](https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074?lang=en)! ### **You're a fit if...** You must enjoy shipping things end to end, which tends to translates these helpful skills/experiences: - **2+ years experience across multiple growth channels** (ads, emailing, sponsorships, etc). Years as a GTM focused founder count. We’re open to less experience here if you’re written code professionally before. - **Copywriting skills** - you’re able to write copy that doesn’t irk engineers. [Here’s a good proxy](https://www.markepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-guide) for what we mean - **Design taste -** you can quickly repurpose Figma designs and review contractors’ work Bonus: - **Engineering culture -** being able to turn knowledge of the devtool ecosystem into non-standard experiments ideas would be a huge plus. For example, can turn “we want to try contributing to open-source repos” into “We can find lots of OSS repos on the Linux foundation website, and select some based on things like whether they have labels for new contributors and no stale PR. Also, most projects have a Discord, we could get in touch with the team there”. - **Remote ready** - we're getting a hacker-house in SF, but outside of this we've have been fully distributed. It’s great if you want to be with your family! Note that one of the founders always flies to new-joiners to make onboarding easier. ### **What we offer** #### **Non-standard stuff** ⚖️  **10 years options exercise windows** — most startups employees never exercise their hard-earned equity options because the standard clause forces them to buy it within 3 months of departure. We care so much about equity that on top of giving offers way above market, we switched to a new legal documents software solely because the old one didn’t support changing the default “3 months” to “10 years”. 🛂  **We’ll sponsor your visa** — to wherever you want. We already support a long list of countries. If your dream country isn’t on the list, we’ll go the extra mile to make it happen. 👋  **“We got your back” budget** — If you need daycare for your kids, new headphones, or a taxi ride, we got your back. Even if it doesn’t fall into a predefined “perk and benefit” category. 🌱  **Growing you plan** — we’ll help you build your growth plan and support you with all our resources. We’ll intro you to people from Neo, YC, and our own networks, support you with budget to hire coaches and join communities, etc. 🌎  **We are a fully remote company** — We hire the best people in the world without restriction. Work wherever and in whichever timezone you want, and travel around the world to meet the team during quarterly onsites ([pictures here](https://www.instagram.com/gitstart/)). #### Standard stuff 📈  Equity for everyone 🌏  Quarterly onsites (last ones: Greece, Turkey, Thailand) 🏝 Unlimited Paid Time Off 💰  Contributions to a retirement savings plan 🐣  Parental leave 🍽. Meals with fellow GitStarters 🧑🏻‍💻  Remote work budget 📞 Something missing? Tell us Also, we're flexible about the title. Founding Growth Engineer, Founding Growth Marketer, Founding Growth Lead, Growth Founder, etc. Whichever you prefer! Finally, we offer competitive compensation and meaningful equity along with a chance to make a significant contribution to changing the lives of millions of engineers across the world. ### **Hackweek based recruiting** We are weird about hiring. We’re skeptical of resumes and we don’t trust interviews (we’re happy to talk though!). Since nothing beats working together, we love inviting people for a hackweek (or hackweekend) - come hack on a problem with us and see if you like it! It’s compensated, of course. And fast: we typically extend offers within 3 working days, starting from the end of the hackweek. Not sure whether this is for you? Read this candidate's feedback! > See, I've been in the industry for quite a long time. And I had lots of interviews and interviewers throughout my career. Some were good, while some sucked big time; as usual. HOWEVER, and I'm not even exaggerating when I say this - interview experience with GitStart was not even ONE OF the best, but absolutely THE BEST I ever had in my 15 years career. Every person that I spoke to in the process was EXTREMELY charismatic, really eager to learn about myself and, what's more, it was absolutely obvious that they LOVED GitStart. I have NEVER EVER EVER seen anything even remotely like this. So how was the process? Amazing! I actually enjoyed it and was looking forward to more of it :D If you’re interested, email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) and we’ll set up a chat! #### Before afterza Go To Market skills are the difference between wasting years building products with few users and succeeding. Luckily for you, we’re short staffed so we’ll coach you to learn them at GitStart! - ❌ BS work → ✅ Lead high priority projects (launch our Ticket Writing LLM on ProductHunt, start paid ads, set-up a new funnel to promote integrations as a use-case, etc) - ❌ Glorified data entry to save money → ✅ Get unlimited budget to accelerate yourself with tools and contractors. - ❌ Lack of mentorship → ✅ Work directly with founders and mentors we pay to coach you. In other words, this role's day to day will match that of the GTM-focused founder (usually the CEO) of a devtool company. Your mission will be to generate as many sign-ups and demos by launching new avenues for growth from scratch. You'll have a disproportionate impact because: - We're just starting the growth team, so all the low hanging fruits are up for grabs - You'll be working on the no. 1 priority of the company - You'll be surfing a huge wave: the future of engineering with AI is a top trending topic on virtually every platform **Concrete Project Example:** "I learned that within a year of launching paid ads, 83% of the clients of a very similar company came from this channel. This could change the trajectory of the company. I found the person who set ads from scratch there and he agreed to coach us for a fee. Here’s the calendar invitation with him, a credit card with $3k, and a paid ads course recommended by veterans. Let’s go!" **Job Specific Perk** - 🏡 Housing is covered - co-live with another 2-3 teammates (interns working on the same projects) in the GitStart House in center of San Francisco (15’ walk from SalesForce Tower), with sea-view and a great gym. - Meet people at YC interns only events - YC organizes events in SF for summer interns at YC companies. This internship is elegible for entry at those events. ## Internship - make it concrete Internships job descriptions tend to be the worse ones, which makes standing out much easier. They also cater to a public that's doesn't really know what they're getting themselves into, meaning that making the day to day more concrete is very helpful in aiding the right people to self-select. Note the non standard title aimed at attracting engineers who want to be founders. ### 📍 Devtool-Founder-Track Intern Go To Market skills are the difference between wasting years building products with few users and succeeding. Luckily for you, we’re short staffed so we’ll coach you to learn them at GitStart! - ❌ BS work → ✅ Lead high priority projects (launch our Ticket Writing LLM on ProductHunt, start paid ads, set-up a new funnel to promote integrations as a use-case, etc) - ❌ Glorified data entry to save money → ✅ Get unlimited budget to accelerate yourself with tools and contractors. - ❌ Lack of mentorship → ✅ Work directly with founders and mentors we pay to coach you. In other words, this role's day to day will match that of the GTM-focused founder (usually the CEO) of a devtool company. Your mission will be to generate as many sign-ups and demos by launching new avenues for growth from scratch. You'll have a disproportionate impact because: - We're just starting the growth team, so all the low hanging fruits are up for grabs - You'll be working on the no. 1 priority of the company - You'll be surfing a huge wave: the future of engineering with AI is a top trending topic on virtually every platform **Concrete Project Example:** "I learned that within a year of launching paid ads, 83% of the clients of a very similar company came from this channel. This could change the trajectory of the company. I found the person who set ads from scratch there and he agreed to coach us for a fee. Here’s the calendar invitation with him, a credit card with $3k, and a paid ads course recommended by veterans. Let’s go!" **Job Specific Perks** - 🏡 Housing is covered - co-live with another 2-3 teammates (interns working on the same projects) in the GitStart House in center of San Francisco (15’ walk from SalesForce Tower), with sea-view and a great gym. - Meet people at YC interns only events - YC organizes events in SF for summer interns at YC companies. This internship is elegible for entry at those events. ## Chief of Staff Interesting bits about this job description: - The red emoji in the title grabs attention, which drove a lot of traffic: we got 5x to 10x as many views as similar job descriptions on YC's internal forum). - There are links to resources on how to define the role, which was very well received given people want to know what they're applying for, and "chief of staff" can mean a lot of things #### Chief of Staff, we ❤️ ex-founders! TLDR: we closed a round last week. Looking for the best talent to scale from hundreds to millions of devs. $3k referral bonus + champagne bottle + a free PR on GitStart. The link to apply is LINK but you're also welcome to email us at XXX. [GitStart](http://gitstart.com/) accelerates software engineers with Pull Requests as a Service. Assign tickets to GitStart Bot, go to sleep, and wake up with PRs. GitStart Bot automatically manages thousands of full-time engineers and runs peer reviews until PRs are ready to be merged. It’s scalable, flexible, and quality is guaranteed: you only pay for merged PRs. #### **Why you should join GitStart** ##### **The team is amazing** - CEO is a national maths olympiad winner and former Microsoft Typescript team member who has already built the same technology in the Quality Assurance market - COO is a Sailing World Champion and IronMan who launched the first and largest coding bootcamps for inmates in Europe and spoke at TEDxHongKong - Our head of CS bootstrapped a crypto startup to 35k active users, a senior engineer is a Google Women TechMakers Scholar who organizes 500+ people rave parties, another has already been through the whole seed to unicorn journey,... and the team is diverse: 50% women engineering team, 9 nationalities - Investors and advisors include 2 CTOs of the 10 highest valuable companies, several CEOs and CTOs from the top 10 highest-valued startups worldwide, and YC, the world’s most prestigious accelerator ##### **The business is growing exponentially** - Growing 15% month over month for the past 6 months - Despite avoiding press coverage as we’re in stealth mode, we were named us top 20 companies worldwide shaping the future of remote work by AngelList, alongside Slack, Figma and Notion - We just closed a large undisclosed fundraising round with the best investors on the planet ##### **It changes lives** - GitStart helps driven but unemployable devs (wrong timezone, poor English, very junior) grow into stars who get hired at Facebook, Google and Amazon - GitStart’s developer community is growing virally in places like Nigeria, Brazil, Kenya, Pakistan, India, Nepal, etc with more than 2,000 monthly applicants - “We don’t grow devs to make money, we make money to grow devs” #### **Your missions** Your mission is to accelerate the founding/exec team by playing the role of an extra founder, with less emphasis on the vision and more emphasis on tactical execution. You will get to lead as many projects as you are able to handle in all areas of the company. Examples include planning our 12 months hiring roadmap and hiring recruiters to execute it, figure out how to keep our subsidiaries "arms' length", and drafting investor updates. For more content on this hard to define role, you're welcome to read the best content we found on the matter: - [https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/chief-executive-officer/chief-of-staff/](https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/chief-executive-officer/chief-of-staff/) - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdlNhxFTAnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdlNhxFTAnM) #### **You’re the right person if…** - If you don’t fit the bill, bear in mind that all we’re really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability. - You have an experience as a founder, a senior operating role at a significant fast-growing startup, or a role similar to that of a chief of staff - You are extremely organized - ex: you have experience in project management, you use Jira/Notion/Trello/etc in your personal life, etc - You speak and write in flawless English - we don’t care about your accent but about the clarity and concision of your communications - Ideally, you have people management experience - You’re deeply interested in software development - bonus points if you have shipped pull requests to production #### **What we offer** 1. Super flexible work culture: flexible working hours/days, >half of the team is fully remote 2. Regular off-sites to bond and explore the world (last one: 1 month in Paris 🥐!) 3. The Hong Kong office features gym, pool, music room, coffee machines, and a nice view on the ocean 🌊 - we can sponsor visas. The SF/NYC offices closed with Covid as we went remote but we’ll be back! 4. Personalized growth plan & mentorship for every employee + access to the world’s most prestigious entrepreneurship community through the Y Combinator 🤝 5. Competitive compensation and meaningful equity along with a chance to make a significant contribution to changing the lives of millions of developers - “We don’t grow devs to make money, we make money to grow devs” Written in 2024-05