Tom's notes:

If you started looking for a new job tomorrow, what would you look for in a job ad?

When Ed Ross started recruiting talent for tech companies in the early 2000s, he was tasked with sending applicants lengthy job specs. These specs contained the information companies thought candidates required—namely, a list of skills and requirements for the open position.

After running his own consultancy, Ed’s now the Senior Tech Talent Acquisition Manager at Skyscanner, a flight search engine and booking marketplace. He took the time to teach us a thing or two about what candidates look for in a job description and how to recruit top engineering talent in a fiercely competitive market.

Back when Amazon was doubling down on their London-based engineering teams, Ed was one of the lead recruiters tasked with sourcing talent. Six months into the job, his agency was one of the only companies left in the ring. Customer-obsessed Amazon had a very different culture than most other UK tech companies at the time, and they proved extremely difficult to hire for.

Ed also took the business lessons of Amazon’s “Flywheel Effect” to heart and applied them to the recruitment process. Where the center of Amazon’s flywheel is customer obsession, Ed found himself obsessed with candidate experience.

Lengthy job specs became a thing of the past. Instead, Ed and his firm created one-pagers for each job they needed to fill.

We gave them that idea of, if you went down to the pub on a Saturday with your friends and they said, ‘What’s your new job?’, that’s the kind of language you would use.”

Listen to the full episode now to learn more!