Although I appreciate your effort, willingness to share&help,as well as clever marketing, I consider publishing such boilerplates rather bad idea. It can hurt all parties involved: employers,candidates and your business. Why? For companies, taking such a shortcut (let's be honest-many people will use them with just cosmetic changes) is not only damage for their image and failure to differentiate and attract talent. It's also shifting focus from precisely defined competencies which are specific for the company to generic metrics which lead to wrong hiring decisions. For candidates indistinguishable job offers result in wrong career choices and wasted time/opportunities. For you it means more inadequate applications to process and as consequence bigger challenge whike convincing the customers to the value that you deliver. Hope you'll take it as an inspiration not a rant :)
What seems to you like a marketing effort started from a real customer need, believe it or not.
Would I use a boilerplate? No. Do I think boilerplates are useful as a start for many people? Absolutely. I wish I could show you some of the job descriptions that companies put up using our software. They are hideous, wrong, uninformative, clearly showing you that people have no idea how to write a good job description.
We started off by creating some simple templates, as a guidance, so we help our customers make something nicer. We ended up building a small library and thus we decided to share them. (I guess that counts as marketing, but at least you get something useful)
Back to the original question.. are boileplates a bad thing? My answer is "it depends on what you would do without them". If you can write a half-decent description of the person you need, in your own words, then by all means don't use boilerplates.
If you're a very small company, hiring for the first time maybe and you need to start off by customising something, get some inspiration.. boilerplates are useful.
We make software for the small and medium company. We feel that software is not just the buttons. It's also the method. It's every kickstart you can give your customer to do his job a bit better. (for some, our guides on how to hire is the best form of help, others want to get the canned thing and make a few changes..)
[+] [-] ArekDymalski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moraitakis|13 years ago|reply
Would I use a boilerplate? No. Do I think boilerplates are useful as a start for many people? Absolutely. I wish I could show you some of the job descriptions that companies put up using our software. They are hideous, wrong, uninformative, clearly showing you that people have no idea how to write a good job description.
We started off by creating some simple templates, as a guidance, so we help our customers make something nicer. We ended up building a small library and thus we decided to share them. (I guess that counts as marketing, but at least you get something useful)
Back to the original question.. are boileplates a bad thing? My answer is "it depends on what you would do without them". If you can write a half-decent description of the person you need, in your own words, then by all means don't use boilerplates.
If you're a very small company, hiring for the first time maybe and you need to start off by customising something, get some inspiration.. boilerplates are useful.
We make software for the small and medium company. We feel that software is not just the buttons. It's also the method. It's every kickstart you can give your customer to do his job a bit better. (for some, our guides on how to hire is the best form of help, others want to get the canned thing and make a few changes..)
[+] [-] kawsper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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