Employers

Creating Great Job Descriptions

The posting is a filter. Its job is to attract the people who would be good at this and to help everyone else opt out early.

The short answer

  • Describe the work, not the company. A candidate deciding whether to apply is trying to picture their week, and most postings never tell them.
  • Split requirements into what is needed on day one and what can be learned. Anything learnable in two months is a preference, not a requirement.
  • State the pay range, the location expectation and the level. Withholding them does not widen the pool, it fills it with people who withdraw later.
  • Cut the boilerplate. Every generic line spends a reader's attention without telling them anything, and attention runs out before the posting does.

What a posting needs

What the person will actually do. Ideally in the shape of a week or a first quarter. "Own the reporting pipeline and the three dashboards the sales team runs on" tells a candidate more than eight bullet points of responsibilities.

What success looks like. What would make this a good hire six months in? This is also a useful test on your own side: if nobody can answer it, the role is not defined yet.

Requirements, split honestly. Day-one essentials in one list, learnable things in another. Say explicitly that the second list is not a barrier.

The practical facts. Pay range, location and remote expectation, level, reporting line, and how the process runs. These are the things candidates search for and the things vague postings lose people on.

What to cut

Boilerplate about the company. Two sentences is generous. Candidates who want more will look you up.

Personality adjectives. Rockstar, ninja, passionate, self-starter. They filter nobody out and read as filler.

Inflated requirements. The classic is years of experience used as a proxy for competence. It excludes capable people and is trivially gamed by everyone else.

Duplicate responsibility bullets. Most long lists say the same three things in different words. Merge them and the posting gets shorter and clearer at once.

Wording changes who applies

The same role, described two ways, gets different applicants. That is worth knowing because it means the posting is a lever, not just a description.

Long requirement lists reduce applications more from candidates who are self-critical than from candidates who are confident, which means an inflated list does not filter for skill so much as for self-assessment. Saying that a list is a guide rather than a checklist measurably widens who applies.

Being concrete about the work has a similar effect in the other direction: it attracts people who recognise the job and repels people who would have found out they disliked it in week three.

Do not reuse the last one

Most bad postings are inherited. Someone copies the description from the last time the role was filled, updates the title and posts it, and the accumulated vagueness of three previous copies goes out again.

Rewriting from the current definition of the role takes twenty minutes and is the cheapest quality improvement available in hiring.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What the person will actually do, described concretely enough that a candidate can picture their week. What success looks like at six months. Requirements split into day-one essentials and things that can be learned. And the practical facts: pay range, location and remote expectation, level, and how the process runs.
Yes, in almost all cases. Withholding it does not widen the pool; it fills it with candidates who withdraw when the number appears, which costs both sides time. It is also increasingly required by law in some jurisdictions, so check your own.
Short enough that it is read to the end. Most postings are long because they repeat the same responsibilities in different words and carry paragraphs of company boilerplate. Cut those and a thorough description usually fits comfortably on one screen.
Long lists reduce applications more from self-critical candidates than from confident ones, so an inflated list filters for self-assessment rather than for skill. Splitting requirements into day-one essentials and learnable preferences, and saying plainly that the second list is not a barrier, widens who applies without lowering the bar.

Related guides

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Comparisons

By industry

  • Information Technology
  • Retail
  • Hospitality

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A clear posting is also what applicant scoring works against, so the better the description, the more useful the ranking.

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