Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is a theory for what causes us to buy things. The quick description is: jobs arise in our lives and then we hire products or services to do them. The key insight is that the job attributes should be used to guide product development, not the customer attributes. Here is Clay Christensen describing the concept if you haven’t heard it before.

This theory was publicly introduced in his book, The Innovator’s Solution, but is being popularized by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek in Switch Workshops and soon at the Business of Software conference.

I was lucky enough to participate in some training with Bob and Chris, and so I often think of Jobs theory whenever I wonder why people do anything, and recently I’ve been thinking about recruiting (yes, Atalasoft has a job opening for a software developer in our marketing department to help evangelize our products).

Now, when hiring we naturally think of the job we need done, and of course, we are explicit about that when writing the ad, evaluating resumes, interviewing, ultimately hiring someone. The job has hiring criteria and we use it.

But, at the same time, potential applicants also have a job-to-be-done in their lives, and they are judging us with hiring criteria. In this case, we usually fall all apart. We try to write job descriptions that sell ourselves too, but, frankly, I’m not sure they actually address the applicant’s criteria.

In their workshops, Bob and Chris teach how to find out why people switch from one product to another by interviewing people that have done it already. How many of us have interviewed our recent hires to find out why they switched from their old job to ours, how they found out about it, what happened in their lives to cause them to want to switch jobs? If we did that, I think we’d find that we’re advertising in the wrong places, not emphasizing the right strengths, and generally not making the applicants know that we meet their hiring criteria.

I’m sorry to say that I haven’t done this, so I don’t really know what needs to change.

In any case, I’m going to be thinking and posting more about this — hopefully trying it in practice. In the meantime, if you are a web programmer (preferably in .NET or Java), have at least 5 years of experience, and you want to work in a developer tools company’s marketing department, creating technical content (demos, blogs, articles, sample code, tutorials, brochures, etc) to help developers learn more about our products, get in touch with me. At Atalasoft, you’ll work with smart and hard-working colleagues, where we have an enormous amount of respect and trust in each other. Some of the best programmers in Western MA have chosen to work here, and we can’t wait to meet you.