how to write a job description & hire correctly w/ ceo/cofounder of flightcontrol (yc w22) | creator of blitz.js

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it for it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old-fashioned email, social media at tdesntdesseyn.com. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Well, let's dive in. Brandon, give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And then we'll go from there. Sure, so I'm Brandon Behr, co-founder and CEO of Flight Control and also the creator of Blitz.js. So Flight Control provides a Heroku or Vercel like deployment experience on a company's own AWS account.

So it gives you kind of the platform as a service experience without all the limitations and things that come with that. I love that. I love that. And then what's Blitz? Can't forget about Blitz. So Blitz is a full stack toolkit for building full stack next JS applications. So it provides a authentication, provides a zero API data layer, which is a type safe RPC thing, as an alternative to REST or GraphQL. So it just makes it, Like the whole idea is to give you a Ruby on Rails inspired developer experience in JavaScript. I love that. I have no idea what any of those words meant but that sounds sexy.

Nate, it's great to see you man. Danny, Danny Thompson. I love his Gracie, your brother. LinkedIn, you should, I don't know who you are but I'm glad you're here this morning. All right, so job descriptions and the screening process. So I wanna talk about job descriptions. I feel like this is a topic. I'm so excited to talk to you today, Brandon. You have no idea because this is a topic I'm so passionate about that I would say almost no one does it right except you that I have met. So talk about why you put so much stock into job descriptions. Well, first and foremost, you have to have a really strong identity as a company knowing who you are and what your core values are.

and not the kind of core values that you frame on the wall and everybody forgets about. But like, who actually are you? What do you do? How do you act? And, you know, like, I've hated most of the jobs I worked at because the company did not have a soul. The teams were heartless and there was a major lack of human connection and belonging. And so I've always said, I want to build a company that I would actually want to work for. So that means a company that has a heart and a soul at workplace that does not pigeonhole people into Precisely defined roles, but rather encourages people to bring as much of themselves to work as they would like and contribute in many different ways And then overall just a workplace that facilitates human connection and belonging.

I love that I love that. Did you have that recited? I feel like you had that memorized But before this that was beautifully said I do a little preparation. I love it I love it. Chris, it's great to see you. Dev is great to see you. I love it. People in the chat, Danita, it's great to see you as well. So Brandon, let's go over this, right? So I think this is great. Developer Advocate at Calm, Ambicious DevTools Startup. Talk about, I want to go through everything, right? So I don't want this to go unnoticed. First off, Developer Advocate at Calm, Ambicious DevTools startup, why did you choose those words?

So overall, this job description is, I think, it's really important to understand that this is a manifestation of my heart as a founder and the soul of the company, like who we are. So you have to get really clear on that as the foundation and then clearly communicate that in the job description and all the way through the application and interview process. So starting as a title here, like most job descriptions are just like they have just the thing like developer advocate or software engineer to yes like that. Like it's so boring right like you need to be like I want to stand out a little bit like get a peek their curiosity like make them click you know and see what is this about.

I love that. Why did you choose calm and ambitious? So like we're a tech startup, we're a VC funded tech startup, right? And so a lot of that perception you might have is like, oh, it's just like this tech bro-y, this like, you know, we're 100 hours a week kind of thing. And we're not like that. Like we care a lot about people's humanity. We care about work-life balance. We have a 32 hour work week. And so calm is like, we put that in there, but yet we're also very ambitious. like we're not just, you know, sitting around sipping tea, like we work hard, but then we go enjoy our rest of our life.

I love that. I love that. So scroll down for me and let's kind of unpack this a little bit more. Yeah, Nate, I kind of thought this too, not going to lie at first glance, I thought the name of the company was calm. I thought that too. So there we go. That's a good feedback. Yeah, good feedback. All right. So why pictures? Why pictures? Talk about that. Okay, so I think one of the most important things to drop out to employees is who are they working with? Right like that. That's just like over and over again is like the team is like the biggest thing that matters to people Do they enjoy who they're working with?

And so we want to put it straight up in front like who are we and Also like you can see these are all pictures and cool locations so So it really shows that we don't just talk about like work-life balance, we don't just talk about work hard and then go enjoy life, like we actually do that. I love that. God, keep scrolling down. All right, so yeah, go ahead. This section is getting clear about who we are, who the company is, why the company exists, what's your core value proposition, And you want to get people really excited about your company, like what's different, right? And there's nothing like a hockey stick, growth chart to do that.

Right. And so like a lot of the things I try to do in here is not just tell, but show. Right. Right. So you can say like, oh, we're growing really quickly. But like, yeah, I mean, everybody likes to say stuff, right? But like show it. But even if you can't have actual numbers on this chart, like show something, even if it's like completely, like, you know, it's not like your core KPI or something, like find something that's growing well. Like you're not gonna lie, but like, you know, if you can find something to show what your company is doing, that can be really impactful.

I love that. I love that. All right, let's keep scrolling down. Meet our team before. I love this. So talk about what that process went into this. So it goes back to what I mentioned at the start of who you work with being super important. And I don't know if I've ever seen a job description that has bios about people like this. No, I don't know. And I don't know how I got the idea. I was just like, I guess I'd want to know who I want to work with. And so here's the people, who you're going to be working with. So just show like, you know, what are the people's roles?

Where they from? What do they do a little bit about them? And the whole idea is like hey like if this is who we are, right? You should know up front if for some reason you don't want to work with these people, you know, don't worry about applying. Yep I love that. Alright, let's keep scrolling down. So this is All about the role. Yeah, okay, okay Yeah, and so The first time that I did a hiring process for flight control for the startup, I fell flat on my face in a very big way because we did not really know what we wanted. And so I like that totally failed.

I had to start over from scratch and I spent like a month designing this whole process from scratch from first principles. So number one, you have to get really, really clear on what exactly do you need in this role and what kind of person do you want in that role. And then you need to design the, you need to lay that out in the job description and then design the application and interview process around those requirements. Okay, so this has some paragraphs giving background and context on why we're hiring for this role and how that role has an impact on the company. love that. So we're getting really clear about like, this is, this is why, you know, this is how you fit into the team and the company and all of that.

Well, and I love this too. It almost reads, I just, it reads like a story. Like it doesn't read like a JavaScript. So like I love that deeply understand our product, it strengths and weaknesses. Most people would say three plus years of dev rel experience. You know what I'm saying? So the first, this section is responsibility. So this is saying like, hey, this is what you're gonna be responsible for in the role. Most of our, like our, just a regular, like a software engineer has, it's a shorter list. That since this is our first dev rel role, like there's a lot that we kind of had been here.

But then the requirements is where you like, okay, yeah, we do have in here like three years full time experience. And that's fine, and that's fine. But again, so the requirements is you want this list to be as short as possible like the bare minimum Correct. We probably have too many in here on this one. We only had like three or four points for a software engineering rule and one of the reasons you want to do that is because If you have too many requirements You're gonna turn you could turn away a lot of great candidates and disproportionately those who are underrepresented in tech 100% 100% like do you need that degree on the job description?

Do you I'll never forget Becca our friend Becca Great speaker been on the show before she she told me about one time For me it's She said that there was a requirement on a job description that says traveling four times a year She goes, I have four kids. I can't travel. And my argument and my caution to any companies that put that in there, did that person actually need to travel four times a year? Or did they just need to travel one time a year, but you're trying to get them, you know, as flexible as possible, but then you missed out on Becca. Right. So very important.

Um, there's, there's two comments going back for the pictures. Devs, pictures are great. Expressions show diversity. I've heard people say about companies having basically zero diversity. Yep. Totally get it. It keeps you accountable with the images of the team being so small. How are you ensuring that your job descriptions are creating a sense of belonging for people that don't look like people in the picture? How are you moving by? Yep. And that's what we're talking about right now, Ashton, about making sure he essentially puts what you need to have and the bare minimum, right? Isn't that what you said? Yeah. Something else I've done is run this whole job description through a, I forget what you call them like it basically like a bias checker or like correct.

Yeah. It'll tell you like how like is it like really coded masculine or feminine or whatever. Correct. I believe this is like it's it's all nothing inside. OK, that's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, who would want to miss out to get back? Yeah, I know. Seriously. Absolutely. So and then so here's what I like what Brandon did here. And this kind of goes back to Ashton's comment about an inclusive job description is that he put the requirements, but if you look at it, his requirements, the only hard and fast requirement, really, is three years of experience. That's it. That's it. The rest of it is soft skills.

Teacher, writer, grit, empathy, credible, right? Those are things that if I'm a job seeker, those are not gonna turn me away per se, right? Because like, most people probably think they have grit. Think they have empathy. Even some, some may don't. Some people think they do. So they're gonna submit the resume, right? It's not. And then what I like what Brandon did is he did the nice to have's, they're a little bit more specific, right? DevRel experience, DevOps experience, conference speaking experience, but it's a nice to have. It's not a requirement, which I think is very, very important. I think companies need to be very mindful of that.

Exactly. I love it. So is that, is that the full job description? Nope. Nope. Oh, here we are. Nice. Dang, this is awesome. All right, what is this? You are someone to do. So just a bit more about the kind of person that we're looking for. And we are a team that seeks to work really well together by building deep relationships. And so this is important to us. And so if you're someone that wants to just work by yourself, you don't really wanna interact with the rest of the team, we wanna just show you're probably not gonna be a good fit here. Yeah, absolutely, I love that.

This next section I absolutely love. Your typical week at flight control, I love this. Tell me why you decided to put this in here. Like, I wanna, if I'm gonna work somewhere, I wanna know exactly like, what is it gonna look like for me to work there? So, you know, most job descriptions is just this garbage, you know, it's like, I can't picture myself in that role. Like there's nothing to help out. There's no storytelling. It's storytelling, it's storytelling. It's really storytelling. Yeah. And so when you're trying to get good candidates, you want them to be able to picture themselves working at that company, what it would actually be like, and to get excited about that.

And so one of that is like, what are you gonna do on a weekly basis? Like what meetings are you going to attend? Who will you be working with? Working hours, all of that sort of things. Yep, absolutely. All right, you can grow with us, scroll down. Our code of excellence, I love that. So this is where, you know, this is like your core values. Like you wanna have those, you know, on here. What do you really care about? How are you as people? And so yeah, these are these are really important. I love that I love that and then and then salary and benefits What would you put down there fully remote 32?

I love that. Oh Look at that you put you put the salary in the job description props to you big dog. There you go. That's what I'm talking about This is great. That's so good one thing that people Comment on a lot is our mr. Elite. That's awesome That's awesome. So that's another way to indicate like, hey, we value women. Yeah, 100%. I love that so much, man. This is so well done. Is this all of it? And then lastly is the entire interview process. Look at this, people. This is what I'm fucking talking about. He sets expectations up on the front and imagine that.

So it's basically like people told us, hey, you covered everything that I care about as a candidate that would want to know. So this is that and then this isn't even, I guess we can open up the application if you want to. Oh yeah, so I want to talk about this. Okay, so first off, any questions on the job description, please start up in the chat. We're going to move on to the application process because it's the second part. Before we do this real quick, Brandon talk about especially the startup. Talk about why you are going after a DevRel person because I could I could push back when you go Brandon You're already doing it.

So this is kind of a dumb higher But talk about the importance of it because it's not it's not a dumb higher But yeah talk about why you're going after a DevRel person with such a small company So we're a developer tool company, right? So we're developers our customers I'm currently doing pretty much all the DevRel going to some conferences is you're literally everywhere everywhere. I was everywhere. You are everywhere. And so I just don't have enough capacity to do everything I need to do. Like I'm the CEO. I'm like, I'm doing so many things beyond just DevRel. And so I need like, I could probably have like three or four, three people full time right now on DevRel, just the amount of content that we need to write documentation, the education materials.

And so, yeah, we just need that help. And we're really clear on what exactly we need. We need a bunch of documentation written out. We need a bunch of educational materials. And there's a bunch of things that we have around, it's like integration slash collaborations with other tools in the ecosystem, like how to deploy various frameworks and languages to flight control, things like that. Yeah, cool, that's awesome. All right, let's go through the application process. Cause it's something we talked about, which I love that you do. The whole goal here is to reduce the amount of interviews. Like I wanna streamline this process, you know, as much as possible.

So I basically eliminate the screening call. You know, they have initial interview with me, but it's 45 minutes. So it's not just like a quick screening call. I do not get that like thing, you know? So question design is super important because the questions you ask and how you ask them gives off strong signals about who you are as a team and a company. And so if you spend a lot of time on the job description, but then revert to corporate BS in your application process, then you massively watered down all the work that you did on the job description. Amen. OK. So like one of the first things is preferred pronouns.

So indicating like, hey, we care about all people here. Correct. So kind of normal stuff. We don't require a resume, but you do need LinkedIn profile or resume. I love that. Honestly, shout out to you. I know a lot of devs that don't have resumes. I get it. And honestly, I don't know why employers just don't take LinkedIn's more. I know why it's cause stupid ATS is but keep going. So I love you included your TikTok profile. I love that. It's DevRel, right? So that's- Yeah. I love that. So this is a big one. Why are you interested in working with us? And one thing that we, so because we put so much effort into the job description and in this application process, that if you do this well, you get a really, really high signal to noise ratio for the people who apply.

It's really clear, is this someone actually really like a good possible candidate? Or are they just like, are they not? Fringe, right. Yeah. And so it's really evident, like there's a lot of people who come through here. And after reading all the job description about who we are and everything, they just write like one word answers or like super short things to this. And it's like, if you read the entire thing and you're not like moved in some way, like you're probably not going to be a good fit here. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is good one. What are your superpowers? That's one of my favorites.

What are your top two to four personal values explaining what they mean to you? So again, this is showing that like, we're not just saying that we care about people, we actually do, like we're actually interested. We put this as like part of the application, like we care about your values, aligning with our values. Outside of work, what are you passionate about? Love that, love that question. Basics like experience stuff. Right, writing skill level, one star, I don't write too good. And then a couple more of my favorites here is what skills of yours have been under appreciated or undergraged? Oh, why'd you include that one on there?

Because I know from my experience as an employee, I had so many skills that were not being used. And it frustrated me. I was like, I can contribute in so many ways. And so the answers to this are usually like provide some good insight. What are you currently learning or getting better at, if anything? And so like we really care about growth mindset. And so this is one of the questions that I test for that. I love that. Fly control, our top value is excellence. Tell us about a time within the last two years that you honor this value and your work. So this is testing for excellence because it's one of the really important things for us.

Love that. This is great and then and then so and you said What do you think your hit ratio is on this so when I say hit I mean the people who submit? To who you think could work. I'm not saying who to hire but like let's say a hundred people submitted their profile through this Because this is so extensive. How many people would you probably interview with a hundred people? Let's just say ten Let's just say ten people exactly. It's actually about one of this Oh, so 100 people fill it out. You pick about 10 people. So it depends on where you post a job, whether it's a high quality job board or not.

Sure. So that has a massive impact on it, but what they're roughly saying, the 10 to 20 range. What, okay, so 10, 20%, which I think is really good in recruiting terms. If you can get above 10% hit rate, you're doing pretty well. What's your most valuable job board? I'm kind of curious by that comment. So, let's see. So for this DevRel, it was Twitter by far. Yeah, I think I saw that tweet. It like blew up. I mean, all the best ones just came through Twitter. Yeah. People first jobs has also been sending a number. People first jobs? Yeah. Never heard of it. Yep.

And yes, I think that is most of them on this one. I love it. Awesome, cool, man. This is great. If anybody has any questions, please ask, Brandon, I wanna close it out here with two questions. First question, since this is New Year, New Me, do you do New Year's resolutions? And if you do or do not, I'm still curious if you have one thing personally that you want to accomplish or try to get better at this year? I sometimes maybe would have a resolution, but usually not that much. I'm just always have something I'm working on, a vision, working towards whatever. But the big thing for this year is now that I've got the company launching growing, I feel like I have a lot more capacity outside of this role.

And so I want to have a lot more impact in my local community here in Dayton. In fact, I want to help like teach a lot of people how to code that they have access to. There's going to resources at school or whatever. I love that. I love that. And then so Sean comes in before we ask the last question. Sean, one of the biggest challenges we face is to build and promote that human connection and belonging pieces as a small business with a fully remote team. How do you achieve that with a fully remote small team. This is a whole nother guidance counselor 2.0 live for sure but Brandon if you want to try to tackle this in a few minutes you can.

So number one we get together in person twice a year. Live everybody in somewhere you have to have that in person. Yeah you have to. I mean as much as a fully remote component guy that I am you still need the in person. Yeah, exactly. We have, we have a weekly like copy chat session where we just, at the start of the week on Mondays, we just get together and just chat and maybe play a little bit. My team does kind of the same thing. We just shoot the shit. How was your weekend? I usually ask like an open ended question. Yep. And then we also try to work as a team.

So not just like, if you have like engineering team before, not where like one of them is just doing one thing and someone else is over here doing something else, but they're actually like all working together they're on the same feature. And so that helps build that connection and with each other. I love that, I love that. Last question, Brandon. Just shows called Guidance Council 2.0 because we had Guidance Councilors in middle school and high school and kind of college, but now not so much. What would be your biggest piece of career advice for your younger self? I spent much of the first long part of my career always feeling like I was never getting where I wanted to go.

I was never fulfilling my potential. And you know, and in a lot of times I felt like I wasn't really making as much progress that I wanted to. But looking back, like everything I experienced was good preparation. Sometimes you just, for me, I just needed time just to experience life, you know, before that, like I could really go after like this company thing that I'm doing now. So I think the advice was just like keep the faith on what you want to do and who you are and what you want to accomplish and just keep working towards that. And I think eventually it'll work out.

Yeah and to piggyback on that, Dev knows my word track so much. Now they're called therapist. Yes, I know Dev, I'm actually about to head for my counselor therapist now. But I agree with that. I think a lot of people and I talked with Clark by the way that conference Brandon. I are both going to be there in two weeks in Texas Go go buy a ticket. He's got an 80. He's got like a huge discount going on where basically you just pay You don't pay for the food. You just pay for the tickets show up. So go check that out that dot us But what what what he and I talked about you could if you use the code GC to you get a few bucks off your ticket as well, but I think to agree with you Brandon, I think so many people are so wanting to get to the end results so quickly.

And I feel like if you can try to enjoy the ride a little bit and be like, hey listen, I'm not quite right in there. Because that's what happened to me to be totally honest. And looking back on it when I was super upset, frustrating I wasn't getting my way. At the end of the day, it was good for me because there was growth happening the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. I think that I think enjoying the journey is 100% critical. Like, because even whenever you if you don't have that whenever life isn't going like you want it to, you're still not going to have it when life is going like you want it to.

Correct. Correct. And so you just just just figure out how to be satisfied on content where you are, no matter where you are and doesn't mean that you have to like be stagnant and just like give up and not work towards something but like this is duality of being of enjoying where you are accepting it being okay with it and also working towards something else. Yep absolutely absolutely. Well, last question, some of the deep commented will end here. What types of upcoming skill sets are there in the US market as an AI or cloud? I mean, listen, a lot of people I'm getting an AI question a lot right now.

I'm not I'm not right up enough there. I think it's still got a few years or, yeah, but for me, it's cloud. I mean, I think, you know, I tweeted about this the other day. I think I think certs are still good in the cloud space because there's not enough market saturation yet. So I think I think all things cloud Brandon thoughts. Uh, yeah. I, I think AI is a bit of a gold rush. A lot of the, a lot of the products are not really differentiated. And so like there's, you know, you might can get lucky and make something to make a million dollars in a week.

But it's not gonna be probably a real sustainable business. I think the best use case for AI is just plugging it into other tools. Like Notion, AI or whatever, right? Like you're using Notion and then you use to add AI into it and becomes that much more powerful versus a totally standalone product. Yeah, yeah, great, cool. All right, y'all, thanks again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it. Go Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn, Twitter. He's a great follow. I promise. Brain and thanks for hanging out. Stay on real quick as we end it so I can say about you. But y'all have a great...

I want to give one book recommendation is inclusion on purpose by Ruchika Tushan. Nope, not that one. You actually... I actually... Here, let me... Here. I can't real quick. There. I'll put his foot in the private chair. There you go. I love it. Check it out. I love it so much. Cool. All right, y'all. We all have a great, great weekend. We'll see y'all next week. Bye. and do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T. S and on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.