Talk about timing. I'm in the process of having to write a couple of adverts myself. I tell you its hard. Especially if you haven't launched yet.

How can you get people excited without disclosing the whole thing that you are trying to build?

What I really need is a job advert copy writer to sprinkle some magic pixie dust on the thing that will cause talented people to send in their applications...

Bonus link: http://joblighted.com/statistics lists all job boards worth posting to.

How many people in your company? If you haven't launched yet and you still have a very small team (less than 10), I'd strongly recommend hiring people via referrals and networking rather than via job ads.

We are 4 people right now. 3 founders and one that we brought in from the previous company.

What if you have exhausted your network (which admittedly wasn't that large)? How do keep those referrals coming?

That hasn't happened to me yet, but if it did I'd find every interesting, somewhat relevant geeky meet-up in town and start going to them. Obviously don't openly declare you're there to recruit someone, but if you stay aware and know how to spot hackers, you're bound to find a suitable one who happens to be contracting or unhappy about their job... Basically, expand your network :-)

The problem with this is of course that you don't have a clear deadline on when you get the person, so it's best started early while you can still wait.

The ads for Jane Street Capital are pretty good. (They pop up in Gmail for me sometimes.)

0. They get the job title right. If you're a quant, you know it. Is a startup CTO a rockstar or a ninja? It's unclear.

1. They mention the domain knowledge applicants should have. (e.g. finance, not just the technologies used.) Electrical engineering doesn't really have anything to do with what RedWire does -- sounds more like they're in the marketing business.

2. They describe some specific tech, and explain why it's used. Ads mention Scheme and other languages, explain that functional programming and program optimization matter for the high-performance computing they do, and state that Ocaml fits their needs best. Pretty credible.

3. They give a realistic impression of the workplace culture. Clearly, JSC has a carefully culled group of intense people with heavy CS and math backgrounds, surrounded by even more intense traders. Money and prestige matter the most; candy is not mentioned. One can assume collared shirts and possibly ties are involved.

So I'm not the sort of person they're looking for, and I can tell -- I'm not tempted to fudge an application and add noise to the signal. But if I had majored in financial engineering, loved money, and truly did have Free Electron-level programming ability, this would be enough to get my attention.

Ah, Jane Street does have great ads, don't they? OCaml and smart people making tons of money together? The stuff of dreams for a Silicon Valley engineer tired of web infrastructure, who never made any money on options and just happened to read some books by Nassim Taleb.

However, the one bit they don't mention, but all your friends who DID take jobs on wall street will:

"jane street is known as a smart firm that pays little"

It's also a good example of how to not quote a Craigslist article. His use of the pre tag and ghastly CSS means an absurd amount of side scrolling.

I take the guy's point that they are laying it on a bit thick, but I also think he does lambast them a bit too much. Being excited about your company and trying to get other people excited about it too is a good thing.

Describing employees as "rock stars" may not be the ideal approach. But, I'd rather be in a company that's fun with a few goofy buzzword happy managers than one that's precise as hell and every day feels like watching paint dry.

Look, this is how you write a job ad: don't bullshit people. This ad violates that single rule in every sentence.

People who think they are "rockstar" programmers are probably inexperienced college kids with inflated egos. Meanwhile, the EXTREMELY FEW people in the world who are actually as good as this ad is literally asking for are probably wondering what this job pays. $65,000? Oh, stock options too?

People like this aren't exactly free you know, no matter what you just read in the book you just bought at the airport.

What a cynic. I bet the guy behind this post would rather write one of those horrible, dry ads that make our eyes glass over.

I think he has a pretty decent take on it.

Personally I think the whole "rockstar / ninja" jumped the shark a while back. A "rockstar" is a unique and rare individual, it's a loose definition but it would seem to imply that not EVERYONE can be a rockstar (or ninja).

The term is getting over applied to everything these days in the startup/tech world.

Writing job adverts is a tough gig. You need to make people want to work for your job and relate to the position without dipping too heavily into the bag-o-cliches or applying excessive acronym scattershot

Anytime I see the word rockstar or ninja in a job listing, I don't think of a unique individual. The first thing it makes me think of is that they want someone they can pile on totally unrealistic expectations (not enough resources, not enough time, not enough defined requirements) but still expect it to get done perfectly every time. As soon as I read that, I move on to the next listing every time...

None of the really great coders I know think of themselves as "rockstars" or "ninjas." Usually they think of themselves as senior software developers, and other people call them superstars.

Actually, for the kind of person they're trying to recruit, I wouldn't use a job ad in the first place. I'm going to write an article on what to look for and how to hire a CTO one of these days...

There's basically only one way to hire a CTO as a small firm, and that's to poach them from a firm large enough to have promoted one from within.

(A startup one of whose founders is the CTO doesn't obviously need to hire one)

In my experience, the job of "CTO" goes to the founder who doesn't want to code anymore. I feel like maybe people here mean "CIO", which is the person who controls the IT budget.

Either way, startups shouldn't hire C-titles.

I clearly didn't define the term clearly enough.

What I meant by "CTO" was the technical cofounder - the all-round technical get-shit-done guy who can pull the entire product out of his ass if he has to, and who can do so in the completely chaotic environment that is an early start-up. Someone who will basically do "everything" - like any good cofounder should!

Which is what Redline appeared to be looking for. And which is not what you get with a lame job ad.

It's amusing that a comment above made the same point - just in less forceful language - and got modded up. Validation - you downvoters are similarly dry, stuffy cynics.