Jason Fried is the co-founder of 37 Signals, an innovative software startup that is known for its work on the Ruby on Rails web software platform. He’s been in business for 11 years and only now has considered hiring an assistant to help out his company with more of the administrative duties.
It’s a situation that many other startups might also be in now (or soon) — where the amount of administrative tasks has piled up to the point of distracting from the real work in making their product or service better. At the same time, it may be hard to accept that help is needed because when you’re in that startup mentality, you oftentimes don’t want to relinquish that level of control that you have over completing tasks because you’ve gotten used to it.
In a piece for Inc Magazine, Jason Fried chronicles the process he and his company went through in hiring an administrative assistant for the first time:
We decided to go in a different direction to locate our new assistant. Instead of a boring list of skills—this software, that many years of experience, “team player,” etc.—we wrote a list of 26 things that this person would have done in a week had he or she been working here.
The list included things such as “Booked two hotel rooms and two flights for out-of-towners”; “Packed up and shipped out about five copies of Rework to various people”; “Coordinated with Abt Electronics to schedule installation of four flat-panel TVs”; and “Researched and recommended local floral arrangers for weekly flowers for the office.” This way, whoever was applying would know exactly the kind of work he or she would be expected to do.
Seems like a pretty smart way to do a job listing, right? Why adhere to “how it’s always been done” and put up a job posting that asks for certain qualifications when all it does is make it harder on both the hiring company and the prospective candidate in determining if the actual work to be done is a good fit? This way, candidates know what they are getting themselves into and the hiring company can save itself some time weeding through the bad fits.
I just wish more job openings were posted in this manner, it would sure save a lot of time in the job hunting process — on both sides of the table.
via Inc.com
