job posting

[Image description: A black-and-white image of a unicorn looking at a butterfly. It looks like a cutout from black paper. The unicorn has flowing manes, is standing on the ground with grass and flowers and a tree, and is looking to our left. There is a crescent moon on the upper right corner of the image. Image obtained from Pixabay.com]

We need to talk about a serious problem that’s been ignored for a long time. No, not the lack of gel pens given out by vendors during conferences (Seriously, vendors, get better pens! Ballpoint is so cliché!) I’m talking about job postings—they suck. They have sucked for a long time. I bet when aliens dig up remnants of the human race, they’ll encounter our job postings and go, “……” which is alien telepathic language for “these documents suck; no wonder their civilization collapsed.”

We’ve been using the same format, the same tired language, and the same archaic requirements. We need to do better. Unemployment is down, meaning there is more competition for talent. Plus, while we talk about bringing diversity and inclusion, so many of our job posting practices—probably passed down from the 1900s, when…Eli Whitney invented the, uh, printing press with…moveable plates (I didn’t do so well in History)—are thoughtless, helping to exclude many diverse candidates.Continue reading →

Recently, Massachusetts became the first state ever to make it illegal for employers to ask for job candidates’ salary history before making a job offer. This is so awesome that I ditched work and got some soy ice cream to celebrate.

For a while, I’ve been arguing about how crappy it is for employers to not disclose salary ranges in job posting, and how ridiculously archaic and bizarre that we still base people’s salaries on their previous salaries. Nothing else in our society operates like that. Imagine if someone goes to a restaurant, and at the end of the meal, the waiter comes by and the customer says, “So, can I ask how much the last person who ate here paid? $24? Well, then I’m paying you $26.40 for my meal. That’s a generous 10% increase.”Continue reading →

19 tips for making your job posting so amazing, unicorns will weep tears of joy

Let’s make basing pay on salary history illegal in all 50 states