Job Descriptions That Attract (and the Ones That Quietly Repel)

A job description has one job: get the right person to apply. Most of them are written to do something else entirely — protect the company, flatter the org chart, or recycle whatever was posted last time. Sometimes we cannot even find what we used last time! I've worked for large insurance companies where I was instructed to see what the competition was doing and copy their job descriptions. Then everyone wonders why the pipeline is thin and the three best-fit people you know never bothered to throw their hat in.

I've written, rewritten, and inherited job descriptions across two decades of building ops and training teams — and I've also been the candidate reading them, deciding in ninety seconds whether to bother. That ninety seconds is the real spec. Here's how to write for it.

The mindset shift: it's an ad, not a legal document

The document you file with HR for compliance and the document you post to attract a human are allowed to be different documents. For smaller teams of one, there is no HR department and those individuals need to understand that the job posting is also marketing. It competes for attention against every other tab the candidate has open, and it gets skimmed, not read. Yet most postings are written like depositions: exhaustive, defensive, and addressed to no one.

The fastest test of a posting: read only the first two sentences. If they could describe any company in your industry, you've written wallpaper.

The requirements wall (your biggest silent repellent)

Here's the mechanism nobody watches happening: every requirement you add cuts your applicant pool — and it doesn't cut evenly. The research on this has been consistent for years: many candidates, disproportionately women, treat a requirements list as a checklist and don't apply unless they meet essentially all of it, while others happily apply at 60%. A twelve-bullet wall doesn't filter for quality. It filters for confidence, which is not the trait you were hiring for.

The discipline: split your list into need on day one (usually three to five things, be ruthless) and nice to have (label it exactly that, and mean it). For every bullet, ask: would I actually reject an otherwise great candidate for missing this? If the honest answer is no, it isn't a requirement — it's décor, and it's costing you applicants you'll never know about.

While you're there, delete the years-of-experience arithmetic ("7+ years of…") unless something real depends on it. Years are a proxy for competence with terrible resolution; describe the competence instead. "You've run payroll through at least one full year-end" tells a candidate more than "5+ years of payroll experience" and screens more accurately too.

The anatomy of a posting that pulls

The first line earns the second line. Open with the actual problem this role exists to solve: "Our support queue doubled this year and the founder is still answering tickets — you're the person who takes it over and builds the system." A candidate who lights up at that sentence is your candidate. A candidate who doesn't was never going to thrive there.

"What you'll do" in real verbs. Not "responsible for stakeholder alignment" — "you'll run the Monday ops meeting and own the decisions that come out of it." If you can't write the role in plain verbs, the role isn't defined yet, and the posting is the cheapest place to find that out.

Post the salary range. Beyond the growing list of states where it's legally required (the state-by-state playbook is here), postings with ranges simply convert better — and the candidates you lose to a posted range were going to walk away in the first phone screen anyway, after costing you both an hour. Posting it is respect, and respect is conspicuous in a feed full of "competitive compensation."

The "about us" paragraph that isn't boilerplate. One honest paragraph beats four mission-statement ones. What stage you're at, what the team is like, one true thing a recruiter would tell them at coffee. Honesty here is a sorting function — it attracts people who want your actual company and quietly releases the ones who don't.

The repellent words (a field guide)

Some phrases have acquired meanings their authors didn't intend, and candidates translate them instantly. "Rockstar/ninja/guru" → we think enthusiasm substitutes for budget. "Work hard, play hard" → mandatory fun, actual overtime. "We're a family" → boundaries will be a problem. "Fast-paced environment" → understaffed. "Wear many hats" → this is three jobs. "Self-starter with no hand-holding" → onboarding doesn't exist.

You may mean none of these things. It doesn't matter — the reader translates it that way. Say the true version instead: "It's a small team; you'll own things end to end, and we've written down how we onboard you" beats every hat metaphor ever published.

The inclusive pass (ten minutes, real returns)

Before posting, one deliberate pass: strip gender-coded intensifiers (run it through a decoder if you're unsure — "dominant," "competitive," "nurturing" all skew your pool), check that the requirements wall came down (see above), make sure the degree requirement is real (for most ops roles it isn't), and add the line that costs nothing and changes who applies: "If you meet most of these and the role excites you, apply — we'd rather talk than auto-filter." That sentence exists specifically to counteract the checklist behavior, and it works.

What AI changes (and where it embarrasses you)

AI is genuinely good at the structural draft: feed it your role notes — the problem, the verbs, the range, the true about-us — and it'll produce a clean, well-organized posting in seconds. We built this into HRByDesign's hiring flow because the blank page was where managers stalled for a week.

Where AI embarrasses you is when you give it nothing and let it write from its training data — because its training data is every mediocre posting on the internet, rockstar-ninja included. The model fills your specification vacuum with confident decoration. Same rule as everywhere else in this series: AI drafts the structure; the specifics, the honesty, and the final read are yours. If the posting could describe any company, the human pass isn't done.

Closing

The job description is the first moment of the employment relationship, and both sides remember it more than you'd think. Write the problem in the first line, cut the requirements wall to what day one actually needs, post the range, say one true thing about the company, and run the ten-minute inclusive pass.

Then track one number: not how many people applied — how many of the people you wanted applied. That's the metric the posting was hired for.

— Tom