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...
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.
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"
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.