Recently I saw a job description of a Brazilian company, more or less like this:

Be a CompanyNamer!

See job openings for City:

  • Java Developer

Needed Knowledge:

  • Bunch of technologies and certifications

Now, what’s wrong with this?

For starters, there is no description of the actual job. “Java developer” of what? In which part? What challenges would I have?

You should also tell what your company and products do. Not everyone knows your big little company, doesn’t matter how famous you think they are. Please, describe them.

Also, about this company-as-a-verb thing… I particularly think it’s stupid.

But that’s just my opinion.

In my point of view, a good job description may look like:

A paragraph describing your company and its products.

A paragraph describing the job itself, maybe with a list of common tasks on a common day.

A list of stuff you should be good at to apply.

Another list with stuff that gives you “extra points”.

I also like when the company talks about culture. While this doesn’t guarantee that the culture is actually good, it usually means that the company at least care about that.

I also recommend you take a look at some “cool” tech companies. They usually have this solved already. Some examples are GitHub, Spotify, Rdio, Atlassian and Facebook.

But, well, this is just my opinion. A good site to see how to not write a job description is AvoidThisJob.

If you like to see other opinions, you can simply Google about it.

There are plenty of people talking about this stuff.