Why senior DevOps engineers ignore your job advert

The people you want are employed, busy and allergic to tool lists. Five things that make them close the tab, and what to write instead.

A senior infrastructure engineer in Europe hears from recruiters most weeks. They have a job, they are on call for something, and they give your advert roughly the attention you give a cookie banner. Here is what makes them stop reading.

1. The tool list is a shopping list

“AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, GitLab, Prometheus, Datadog, Python, Go, Java.”

Nobody runs all of that. An engineer reading this concludes one of two things: either the company does not know what it uses, or it runs all sixteen and the job is archaeology. Neither is appealing.

Write down what is actually in production today. Then say which parts you want to keep and which parts you would be happy to see replaced. That second list is the interesting one.

2. There is no salary

Senior engineers will not take a call to find out a number. Publishing a range costs you a little negotiating room and saves everyone three weeks. If the range is embarrassing, the fix is to change the range. Hiding it only moves the disappointment to the offer stage.

3. On-call is not mentioned

For an infrastructure role this is like a flat listing that does not mention the rent. Say whether there is a rota, how many people share it, how often it actually pages, and what it pays. If the honest answer is “there is no rota, which is partly why we are hiring”, say that too. Some engineers enjoy building one.

4. Nothing says why the role exists

“We are looking for a talented DevOps engineer to join our growing team” could be pasted under any logo on the continent. Compare it with:

“We moved to Kubernetes two years ago and never finished. Half our services still deploy from a Jenkins box that one person understands. We want someone to finish the move and then make it boring.”

The second version describes a problem. Engineers apply for problems.

5. The process is a mystery

Five rounds and a take-home project will lose you everyone with a choice. Say up front how many conversations there are, who they are with, and how long the whole thing takes. Three stages and a decision within two weeks is competitive. Anything involving the phrase “final final round” is not.

What a good advert looks like

It is short. It names the stack as it really is. It states the range, the on-call arrangement and where the person can live. It explains in two or three sentences what is broken or missing, and what the hire will own once it is fixed. It tells the reader what happens after they apply.

It will read as plainer than your competitors’ adverts. That is the point. The engineers you want have learned that enthusiasm in a job advert tends to be inversely related to the quality of the infrastructure.