Undercurrent #13: Why a boring posting might be hiding the job you want

Two new postings since the last issue. Spellbook opened a Director of Product and closed a Backend / AI Systems Engineer role and a Senior Data Engineer role. Put that next to the two Senior Product Managers they added the week before and a pattern shows up: they've stopped adding people to build the thing and started adding people to decide what it should be and sell it. That's the move a company makes when it's shifting from "ship features" to "win the market." If you've been watching Spellbook as an engineering shop, the door you want may be a product or go-to-market door now.

The other new posting is the one for early-career readers: Hatch posted a Junior Mechanical Designer in St. John's, filed under their "Campus" category, recruiter shorthand for "we expect to train you." It reads like a boring big-firm posting, but there's a good job there (more on reading past the description below).

The salary-transparency picture is unchanged from last week: four postings disclose a band — NetBenefit Software ($60,000 to $80,000, Content Marketing), CoLab Software ($70,000 to $110,000, Business Development Representative), WSP ($104,100 to $138,000, Project Manager / Project Engineer), and Intact Financial ($149,600 to $182,800, Principal Cloud Strategy). Of the 93 open NL-relevant roles, 38 are fully remote.

New grad / career starter: Junior Mechanical Designer at Hatch. St. John's, on-site. A role that's built for someone at the start. Hatch is a 70-year engineering and project firm in mining, energy, and infrastructure, and the "Campus" tag means they're hiring for trajectory, not a finished resume. CAD is the main skill they're looking for, so if you've got mechanical fundamentals and any hands-on CAD (school projects count), you're in scope. It doesn't mention remote, so only chase it if you can be in the city.

Mid-career engineer: Senior Front End Software Developer at CoLab Software. Remote. CoLab builds design-review software for mechanical engineering teams, and this role wants React and TypeScript with Python in the mix, plus the usual "comfortable in a modern front-end codebase" framing. It reads as a real senior IC seat with ownership of UI for complex data workflows. If you've shipped production React and can talk through a performance or accessibility tradeoff you actually made, you'll interview well here.

Career-changer / bridge into tech: Business Development Representative at CoLab Software. St. John's or Toronto, $70,000 to $110,000 disclosed. A BDR seat is one of the cleanest non-engineering doors into a software company. The job is outreach, qualifying, and learning the product, not writing code. If you've done sales, recruiting, customer service, or any role where you had to explain something and earn a "yes," the skills carry. The disclosed band tells you the ceiling before you spend an afternoon on the application.

The boring posting hiding a good job

I'll be honest about something I do, because I suspect you do it too. When I'm working through a list of openings, I skim. A posting opens with "passionately committed to a better world through positive change," my eyes glaze, and I'm onto the next one before I've actually learned anything about the job. I've almost certainly passed over roles I'd have liked because the writing bored me in the first two lines.

Here's what took me too long to learn: the tone of a posting tells you almost nothing about the work. Whoever wrote it was probably a recruiter or an HR system, not the team you'd actually sit with. This week's Hatch Junior Mechanical Designer is the perfect example — it reads like every other big-firm req ("more than 70 years," "mining, energy, and infrastructure"), but strip the fluff and it's a trainee seat designing real systems at a serious engineering firm, with mentorship built in.

So I'm once again recommending reading the job descriptions for the problem. Two questions cut through almost any wall of corporate text: what would I actually be doing in week one? and what's the one hard skill they keep coming back to? For the Hatch role, the answer is CAD. Pretty much all the key responsibilities are tied to CAD. Ask those two questions and a posting goes from a five-minute slog to a thirty-second read, and you stop discarding good jobs for the crime of bad copy.

And if you're the one writing the posting you're burying your own best roles. I believe the fix is to lead with the actual work, not the mission statement: a plain "you'll design X using Y, alongside Z" in the first two lines does more than a paragraph about your values. Name the one or two real must-haves and cut the copy-pasted wishlist that scares off good people who'd clear the bar. In the world of AI, trying to add a human touch to the copy makes the posting pop. The candidates you most want are skimming exactly like I do. Give them something worth slowing down for in the first two lines. It's really become a marketing exercise. Do it well, and you'll attract more appropriate candidates.

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