Martin K wrote:
> It's one guy running a small business as you infer, and it such a
> situation the second employee is certainly going to do everything the
> first (only) employee does.

Yes, in the perfect world. In the real world, you won't find such a person. 
It's unrealistic to expect a person to take care of production scheduling, 
assembly, testing, invoicing, customer support, and then clean the bathroom 
in their spare time. Listing it as a requirement in the job posting is 
counterproductive, as it will discourage potential candidates from applying.

Small businesses with little capital, due to their nature, want to hire a 
jack-of-all-trades. On the surface, it makes sense: there are a lot of small 
things that need to be done, each of which is not enough to keep even a 
part-time employee occupied. Unfortunately, in real life this approach only 
scares away the candidates, because nobody has *all* the required skills. 
Also, switching between tasks results in decreased productivity, so they may 
be better off hiring more than one person anyway.

A better approach is to identify one, maximum two, primary responsibilities. 
A few of the other skills may be listed as "nice-haves", but be careful not 
to list too many. Later, when you go through the resumes, you can pick out 
the candidate whose skill set is the best match for the position.

The bottom line is, a job posting must have a title for the position 
advertised, which gives a pretty good idea of what the job is. "One amazing 
individual" is not a job title.

Oh, one last thing. :) When the primary responsibilities are identified, he 
should come up with a range of salaries, instead of saying "pay is 
commensurate with experience"

> If you had your own business bringing in a
> few hundred thousand in profit,
> could you afford to hire someone to
> clean the bathroom?

Absolutely. We hired a small company to come in once a week and clean the 
entire office. Turns out it's more cost effective, and produces better 
results than having one of the employees do it.

> Maybe if you're in the southern US, but that's a
> different story altogether.

Our company is located in southern US, but that is irrelevant. The cleaning 
is done by a blonde Caucasian girl who happens to be a naturally born US 
citizen.

> As far as his comments about Microsoft products, I think it's at least
> refreshing to see a job ad that doesn't throw out a lot of BS and 100
> three letter acronyms.

Whatever his personal feelings are towards Microsoft, a blanket statement 
like that has no place in the job ad. Discriminating on "moral" grounds 
makes the statement sound especially silly.

> I thought a job like this would be extremely good experience for the
> person who eventually wants to run their own business.

You're right. I've worked for a couple of small businesses in the past, and 
I did learn a lot from them. Mostly, how NOT to run a business. ;-)

Best regards,

Vitaliy 

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