Avoid Bogus, Self-Defeating Selling Points

Most of the time, recruiters and HR reps either aren’t given much to work with or don’t know much about impressing potential candidates during initial phone screens.

The first conversation with a candidate often goes something like this:

Screener: So, uh are you actually a person?

Interviewee: Yes, I’m real.

Screener: Cool, so you have done some engineering work?

Interviewee: Yes, the background on my résumé is legit.

Screener: Awesome, awesome.  Well we are a great place to work … you know, people that are so accomplished … flexible … work hard of course, we don’t sit around … play hard too … great quality of life, access to the outdoors … open door policy … fast-paced work … everyone is so passionate … doing exciting things … make the world a better place … we really only hire the best people after all… blah, blah, blah.

Normally, marketing professionals like to emphasize unique value propositions to potential clients and customers. What’s happened here is the screener is trying to sell the company using a long list of common non-differentiators. It’s akin to a car salesman pointing out that the vehicle comes with a horn, a bag of dark chocolate bon-bons, four tires, and the seat belts have unicorn stickers. In other words, nothing of any substance. Features that should be givens, or inconsequential features that most shoppers don’t care about or don’t want anyway.

It’s all nonsense. Nobody really cares about how your organization:

has such a collaborative vibe	hires the best people
has the most accomplished leadership team	is in a prime location for recreation
offers the most exciting challenges	offers highly competitive salaries
is a fast-paced environment	has the best culture
offers great benefits	has an open door policy
has a dynamic workplace	is looking for rock stars

Nobody really cares about how your workers:

work hard and play hard	are the smartest people
are great multi-taskers	love working together
are so passionate about the work	want to make the world a better place

These are claims made by recruiters for just about every company with which one may ever connect. Many of these are unquantifiable judgements that can be neither proven nor disproven. Their meaning is excruciatingly vague. There’s not a single unique or compelling factor on this list. Some are silly, some should be a given.

Neil Roseman is downright tired of hearing Silicon Valley companies say they “hire only the best and the brightest.” … In most cases, the “best and the brightest” already have jobs, so you’re really just on the lookout for the best available. Plus there’s no way to prove that your hiring process resulted in the right people because you can’t A/B test hiring decisions. - First Round Review, on Neil Roseman of Amazon

Much conventional wisdom around recruiting centers on only hiring “the best” (or the “rockstars” or “A players” or “10x engineers”—terms many engineers dislike!). Under that model, companies should hold a high bar and reject candidates whenever they are in doubt. In reality, this advice oversimplifies the complexity of hiring well. “The best” is hardly as precise a concept as we’d like to think it is. - Technical Recruiting and Hiring

Saying “we only hire the best” just makes you sound foolish. Every company says and believes this. So if every company is only staffed by the best engineers, then all the engineers are the best engineers, and therefore none are. The difficulty of qualifying the statement makes it vacuous. What you are actually trying to do is hire the right engineers for you. So say that, and then prove it by paying attention to your interview process.

Consider the phrase “fast-paced environment”. By what metric is it fast? As opposed to what? Who decided how that is measured? Does the pace fluctuate? How much does the fastest pace differ from the average pace? At what interval are pace measurements taken? Who dictates the pace?

Most of these non-differentiators are similarly absurd. Well, you may think, there’s no harm in trying to accentuate the positive. Possibly. But you should give equal consideration to the idea you might be wrong. The more you emphasize common non-differentiators, the sooner a candidate comes to the realization that there must be nothing really good about your organization at all.