Who cares if the job description stinks!

good morning besides san antonio i am so happy to be with you again this year for the second year i believe um this is my talk sucky job ads don't

matter so first of all who am i and how might who i am and what my journey has included be relevant to you with regards specifically to job descriptions and helping you whether you are actively searching or possibly looking or maybe even hiring i think this will will give helpful information to to all of the parties mentioned um i am the senior recruiting director at nevada in vienna's analytics and cyber security products and services firm if you google us by the way got on my noveta pride shirt today um you'll see that we recently announced that we are being acquired by accenture federal services which is going to be a great new adventure for us um

when i talk about career changes and new adventures and and uh specifically how i and how you can change within your career um i hope that this will all help not only people who are struggling when they see terrible job descriptions um but also help you when you're trying to figure out how to advance from one specific area to another business area or break into cyber as many people often try to try to figure out how to do a lot of that starts at the job description so for me personally i have moved around quite a bit um i have been at nevada for uh almost five years and again we're going to be i'm going to

be helping to build a new business unit within except for federal services very soon so yay for that i am a college dropout that is relevant to this discussion and um started my career in the early 90s started with software development while i went from a front desk person to a software developer to running managing and building help desks to realizing oh my gosh you know what i think i think building the teams is not just what i'm really good at but it's really fun so that i got into recruiting and i've been the director for uh again about five years so my speaking engagements um i gave a few examples ash mukhan was my first one

uh then i did derby um defcon career village last year many many b-sides and um besides san antonio is accommodating me today uh you're you're watching a pre-recorded talk uh i'm actually traveling right now when you see this uh for a family uh thing that i had to do so uh and i mentioned to our con just because i love san diego and i love tour fun so those are a few of the talks i've done and again this one is going to be focused on focused on job descriptions i see you talking about them i know it's a problem i know it's discouraging i know it's disappointing um let's get through how to turn

every time you see a job post into a positive experience and and what to do from there so i will again try to give you examples uh from my personal uh story and how that could potentially relate to you um how i have frankly gotten jobs i wasn't qualified for including the one i have now at least not on paper and hopefully i can help you to do the same thing so the agenda um is going to be okay once you see this job description um what does that mean for you what should you do what should your plan be it should be um how to build your own requirements um a when i say requirements

every job description should be legally should be written in a very specific way according to ofccp you have to the employer has to break that description into what is required as opposed to what is preferred every requirement should be a measurable quantifiable bona fide occupational qualification we will talk about how often you will see that they're not giving you good qualifications they're mixing up what should be preferred and what should be required um are they giving you judgmental things um that is hard to to quantify and hard for you to respond to so we'll talk a little bit about the questions you should ask and how you can respond to those things that don't make sense

and i get it you're gonna say wait a second entry level with a cassp and a phd and 20 years of experience i mean come on so listen we will also talk about why sometimes it happens yes stupidity yes laziness yes sometimes that's the answer there's also a couple other reasons why it happens i'm not going to spend a lot of time on the why but i'm going to help you try to get past that as well talk about the blockers get you to the interview table we want to we want this discussion to bring you from the job ad how that becomes an opportunity for you the project you're gonna do i'm gonna i'm gonna task you with a little

bit of homework when you see job ads when you're looking and this is also going to give some pointers again to the employers who they should be partnering with and how they should be doing their job posts and again how this is going to get you to the interview so think about every job ad that you see as an opportunity it's going to be a little project for you it's not going to be as hard as it sounds i'm not going to make you into a full-fledged stalker here um but but there's so much abundance of information available to us all right um that's the world we live in now there's plenty of information available

to you so let's go from the job ad regardless of the quality of the job ad uh how can i get how can you get from that job ad a look into the company's culture and we'll start with okay i am currently in this business area i'm a contract manager i want to get i want to get into information security and i think i think i really want to get into incident response um i think that's the direction i want to go in so i'm going to do a little search by the way i've had people say you have to have paid accounts you have to have primary uh premium accounts you don't they're wrong

when they tell you that um is it helpful sure will it hurt you no but there's so much information already available to you good recruiters are going to find you whether you have a premium account or not i don't have to spend the time and the money doing that you can go to google you can go to linkedin indeed glassdoor whatever when you see the job post this is now when i give you the assignment to do a little bit of research you're going to say okay abc company is looking forward and i say incident response looking for an ir person that's what i want to do is what i'm interested in doing so what is the culture of this company look

like if they're a good company they have recruiting and ops and marketing all closely partnering with each other so that they're all on the same page so that they are doing the right messaging to find the right people because let's face it the companies need to hire people they need to either sell stuff or they need to provide a service and you need people in order to get that done so they should be partnering closely they should be putting the right messages out there if you spent any time on social media uh over the last couple of months you saw an organization that i don't know if somebody was trying to be cute or clever or what they were trying to do

but they put a little survey out and they were trying to look woke i don't know what they're trying to do but they messed up the community responded they paid attention to what was being said to what was offensive um and to the response from the organization so again really important for that partnership to be there so that the right messaging is going out starting with the job ad and every post that you put out that would direct potential customers and candidates to your company and to your opportunities um what does the culture look like there what are they saying um on social what are they putting out what are they showing you about themselves what is what are the pictures

look like who's there what are they doing it does it interest you do you want to do those things is that something that you're interested in being a part of is it a fit for you and when you look at who works there i'm not saying stalk every single person that works there but look at look at two or three people with job title either in the job posting that you saw or or the type of position you're interested in doing yourself you're going to look at their professional profile they should have one hopefully they do um and you're going to also look at their social footprint and again i'm not saying you're going to become a

full-on stalker don't go to their facebook page leave them alone but do this see if they're talking on twitter twitter is an opportunity for people to talk about their day talk about how do they talk to and about their co-workers their boss what do they say about what they're learning what they're doing what opportunities have been given to them flexibility that's been given to them an opportunity did they get assert cool was it a sensor wow that's expensive who paid for it um is this a company that i can grow at and i can get those opportunities at again what does the culture look like who's doing the work there that you're interested in doing

how are they talking about their days let's face it we talk about the food we eat we talk about the sports teams that we like and we talk about our jobs it's what we do some of us talk about our kids i talk about my dog whatever people are giving away whether they mean to or not good and bad uh testimony about how they spend listen we all spend a good chunk of our days working um so that's the kind of thing that that you're gonna see if you just spend a couple minutes looking at social so what are these people saying and how have they progressed in their careers this is important so you can use

me for an example this person was all over the place they they did this and then this and then this did they make those moves within the same organization did they have to leave in order to grow or in order to change that's important it's also important that frankly for me i'm a good example of someone who wasn't qualified for again not just this job but it wasn't like i had programming experience or helpdesk management experience or recruiting experience when i transitioned and pivoted into those different business areas um so we're going to talk about well how the heck did you do it then i didn't go get the training i didn't get experience i i found other avenues

so we'll talk about that um so are they advancing on their professional profile when you look at it when they're moving around and what is the pattern that you're picking up okay abc company it looks like everyone with this job title stays in that slot for a period of time and then leaves that seems to be the pattern or i see them starting here and moving up cool that's a cool story um it's a cool pattern for you to discover you're going to rate these things right i'm not you're going to go in there you're going to do a little bit of research and then you're going to come up with your top companies based on what you're

discovering by looking at the people that work there i do have a couple disclaimers real quick not because i'm a mind reader but because i think i know what questions you're going to ask because i've been asked them before so i hear i hear you saying but don't they sometimes write a job description specifically targeting one person or one small group of people yes and uh i've done it not my current employer but i have done it um i'll give you an example and this goes way back um i'm not going to save the tool because then you'll know who the people are then i was at a company that specifically wanted at least one of the people who

developed a specific tool now in this instance at that time there was five people let's say you can count on one hand the people on the team that built that tool i did later see someone else looking for people with experience with that tool and they said minimum 10 years experience with blah it hadn't existed that long what so all all being said i did end up i did end up hiring a couple of those people um by the way at them at defcon that's how that happened uh so yeah networking yay events um it works but the job description was written for them let's just say the lead developer's name was jane and they specifically wanted her

so what if you can't find her what if she's not available there's a good chance that's not going to happen um this is where the candidate and the employer need to take it a step further and you you are your own best advocate you you're the expert on you you know what you like you know what you do if you can find a good recruiter and i hope you can because good companies have good recruiters that recruiter is going to make the whole experience about you finding out about you finding out what you like what you want what you do what you have done what you'd like to do and becoming an advocate for you

becoming an agent for you speaking for you to get you from that applicant stage to the interview table they need to get you there by speaking well for you so you got to speak well for yourself and get a recruiter a person an agent who is going to do a good job delivering you to the people that make the hiring decision so enough about those job descriptions that are written specifically for people however if you're not jane then does that mean you can't get the job it means that you have to look at that description you have to figure out how much of your willingness and ability to figure that stuff out you can deliver

and a good company is going to recognize that and appreciate that i will only spend a moment on this next thing what you should run away from um these are real job descriptions thank you by the way to everyone who responded to my tweet and sent in horrible job descriptions i get it i'm sorry i am sorry that it happens um but thank you for those examples i'm not sharing all of them i i picked one description i won't say who it's from but we'll get to in a little bit and i was hoping to automate all the uh animate all the questions that pop into my head if i'm the candidate when i see those descriptions but um

i ended up just writing it all out i will show you these are not funny i'm not going to read them to you because they're offensive but these are real and um hopefully i redacted everything that would tell you who these people are but if you see something i don't know if they're trying to be cute or funny i don't know what the heck they're trying to do here but if if you don't waste your time if if they screwed up this bad um just just run away run away from the from these sturdy okay so back to your requirements so you the the job post is indicative likely of at the very least that this is a company

that's hiring or they were hiring so you're going to build your own requirements list remember we talked about how the job description should be broken down between what is a requirement and what is a preferred skill i need you to do that i need you to have at least two or three columns where you're going to start by figuring out what you need versus want versus would be kind of groovy to have and you can rate as you're looking through those people that are posting and you're doing your research on those on those companies you can rate them according to what looks like it's going to match up to as many of the things that are important to

you as possible that could be flexibility it could be schedule it could be ability to work remotely room and opportunities to grow remember we talked about how you could identify those things based on what it looks like is a pattern for the people that previously or currently work there how does it appear as though they're providing opportunities is their marketing department showing you a lot of cool things that are happening that you'd like to be involved with are they sponsoring cool events are they providing training are they advertising that a lot of people are getting certifications there this is cool stuff think about things that are deal breakers for you too if they're just getting involved

in things that are not a fit for you you know have have high standards pretend that you know this is that this is i have likened to what i imagined dating would be like um you got to keep trying you got to keep your standards high and you have to um figure out what really matters most to you so that this could end up being a long happy relationship when you get your next thing um rank and proceed so this job description kind of put my glasses to see it so let's go through um just real quick i just did the quals and desired and we could uh we could figure out how many of these things we should scoot

down right like so a lot of what they're putting in the basic walls they fail to provide in each of each bullet that's a lot they really need to move some of those basic quals down into desired or they need to further define how they are quantifying and measuring these things but let's start with the first one hmm polly do you mean counterintelligence do you mean ci do you mean fosco what what kind of poly are we talking about here i get that you can't tell me who the customer is but do which one do you mean it matters and do you mean active or do you mean eligible do you mean somebody who who passed the poly three years ago and

they're still in that window or these are reasonable questions for you so what when i walk through the bullets and i could have i could have put a question next to every almost every single one of them but when you see a bullet that that raises a flag or causes a question for you that doesn't mean stop it means write it down and again i told you that a good employer or potential employer is going to have a recruiting team that is going to either find out the answers for you they're 100 gonna spend the time listening to your concerns and then they will either know the answers or find out the answers for you

in this case like i said you're wondering okay what do you mean by polly ask the question uh does comparable experience count for bachelors in my current case if it hadn't i wouldn't be here um and every other job i've had um so that's an important question too if if i hadn't met the ceo of my current company at blackhead because of a networking connection um and i had seen the job posting i probably would not have applied for it because on paper i don't qualify so moving on um i don't know i again have an example for everything but okay when you say all these forensics tools do you also mean does wire shark

count i mean it's open source right does it count i don't know um i hate the way they've grouped all these programming and scripting languages together um c and c plus plus well they're not the same okay so you talk about python and pearl and java that's a bunch of scripting um i have scripted i've never written an executable file from scratch so there's that's very different from scripting does it count because you put it all together what do you mean here are you looking for several different people at all these different levels of experience or different types of experience or do i have to have the operating level experience and scripting like come on you shouldn't

have shouldn't have grouped it all together like that so write it down ask the question be able to speak to what you have done and and um and what you are willing to do and what you are capable of learning having had learned it before um i hate that it says deep understanding what what the heck does that mean are you measuring that with a ruler scale what um ask the question and then when they kind of like again strong what does strong mean shame on whoever wrote this this is bad this is not compliant and it's confusing um so there's a lot to unpack in the last bullet uh under qualls where it says

good interpersonal strong initiative problem solving organizational organizational what writing communication and briefing skills that's a lot so i wouldn't address every single one of those things this is where i give this gives you the opportunity to tell a story i guess um well with regard to interpersonal skills i'm i'm leading a team call um every two weeks and as far as initiative goes i started a research project which ended up turning into a solution for the customer hence problem solving um you can talk about things that you've written you can talk about um any communications that you that you do regularly i write a newsletter once a month um there's just a lot to unpack here but

this is opera an opportunity for you when you get to the interview table after talking to the recruiter to have stories ready that refer to these these different types of skills there are different levels of certs and some certs are harder than others and some are more expensive than others this is an opportunity for you to figure out if the comparable certifications count um or some of these are deal breakers and i will say sometimes the end customer is the one who they they wrote the sound it says must have this um okay are you giving the opportunity or providing the training or the budget to get those things do i need it right off

the bat um so again this is opportunity for you to ask questions so i already mentioned all these different types of blockers um that you will identify within the job posting whether or not you have the educational requirements certifications training and so forth recruiters are going to be a big key for you um if you're super interested in a company and recruiting is i don't know dropping the ball or making mistakes or or not getting your questions answered um you can't take it a step further you can um first of all if they're not answering your application that's just a volume problem um i was super guilty of that back when i was recruiting um this is where you're going to go to

linkedin um every recruiter worth salt is on there they're there and they're and they're listening to and they're answering their messages there you can go directly to anyone that looks like they're in a management position at the company as well and say hey i sent i sent stephen a message uh as the recruiter on this position i haven't heard anything really interested in hearing back let me know if there's anything you need for me blah blah blah so take the time to you know to to do the messaging on um linkedin and see if you can get through that way um so again listen events can't say enough about it hey guess what congrats you all took the step you're all here if

you're watching this um then you already did the first step you're at an event um i wish that i must have written this months ago okay covet is is looking it's looking hopeful that that's coming to a close here or that we're at least in a much better place than we were when i did this a year ago events i can't say enough good stuff about them i do hope and i am hopeful that um events will be doing what uh defcon and b-sides like black hat are doing this year they are um offering the hybrid opportunity i hope they continue that forever frankly at different times in our lives we have different budget and availability for traveling we

can't all jump on planes all the time so offering the hybrid option is fantastic i will say that car hiking village we were doing it before it was a thing um we we were already committed to doing it this year so if you come to defcon you can see us either way virtually or in person but again i'm really excited about this being the the way of the future and the way that we continue to to offer different events for everyone so that they can do it cannot say enough good stuff about mock interviews and resume workshops i can't say for certain that it was invented by kathleen smith but if you're not connected to your

you need to rectify that um she definitely is the first person i ever heard of mock interviews and and resume workshops from um and she dedicates a giant portion of her life it's amazing um to to setting these things up at various conferences it is happening here um at this san antonio today at at most besides have these available i listen uh the mock interviews is going to not just help you um practice and get better at selling yourself but it it can it'll help you also be a better interviewer it's just it's just a really great opportunity for you to be like wait let me rephrase that wait let me start over and the if the

the coaches that are providing the experience not just recruiters they're they're hiring managers and engineers too and people that have been on both sides of the table that can can really help you rephrase things and re-look at things and say hold on what did you mean by that this is i can't say enough good stuff about it if you've never done it give it a shot um as a volunteer or as a participant or both so do the mock interviews do the resume workshops resume workshops are fantastic if you think about it uh when you're going through remember when we were on that horrible job description or that not super awesome job description the further along you get in your

experience and even if you're just starting out there's going to be you should take the time to customize your resume i'm not saying you have to rewrite it every single time but compare it to the job description and try to pick out the things like we were we were talking about all those different languages where you might say well heck i don't i didn't see objective on there but i have i did a training class and objective or i did a project or i used it on a ctf or i wrote a thing on the side whatever the case may be you're when you notice the things in the job description that you either want to address that you have

or that you have something similar to this is your opportunity to customize your resume to push those things up to the top um and the resume workshops is going to be a really good opportunity for you to say and maybe go in there with not just your resume but with the job description and say hey coach help me line these things up um so all of these things here at b-sides the things that i'm mentioning um here on this slide these are all networking opportunities again i mentioned i got this job and several of my positions through networking um not by answering a job description so this is the part where normally i would be

um taking your questions live and because as i mentioned i'm probably gonna probably in a car right now um or i'm far away um my dms are open as long as everybody stays nice my day my dms will remain open on twitter i am k renner or you can hit me up on linkedin i always respond if i can't help you if i can't give you the attention that you that you deserve at the very least i will introduce you to someone who absolutely can help you um again carry around twitter i'm kirsten renner this is my take on how to get past bad job descriptions and um again thank you so much besides san

antonio for accommodating me for giving me this opportunity and i hope everyone has a great day and good luck in your journey thanks [Music]

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