Most job descriptions are internal documents that escaped. They exist to define a role for HR purposes, and they get published largely unchanged. The result is a page that tells a candidate almost nothing about whether they want the job.
Start with the first six months
Replace the responsibilities list with a short description of what this person will actually do once they arrive. What is waiting for them? What is broken? What will they have built by month six?
This does more work than anything else on the page. A candidate reading it can immediately picture the job and judge whether they would be good at it, and whether they would enjoy it.
Compare:
> *Responsible for managing the end-to-end recruitment lifecycle and partnering with stakeholders to deliver against hiring targets.*
With:
> *You will take over hiring for our engineering team, which is going from twelve people to around thirty this year. Right now there is no structured process and hiring managers are doing their own screening. Your first job is to fix that.*
The second one is a job. The first one is a category.
Cut the requirements to what is real
Most specifications list ten to fifteen requirements. Usually three or four genuinely matter.
Everything else filters out people who could do the job well. This is not a hypothetical cost — research has consistently found that candidates from under-represented groups are less likely to apply when they do not meet every listed criterion, which means a padded list narrows your pool in a particular direction.
Separate them explicitly. "You will need" for the genuine requirements. "It would help if" for the preferences. Three or four in the first list is usually right.
And interrogate the ones you keep. Does this role genuinely require a degree, or is that inherited from a template? Does it need five years, or does it need someone who has done the thing twice?
Include the salary
The arguments against are familiar: it limits negotiation, it causes internal comparison, competitors see it.
The arguments for are stronger. Candidates filter on it, so omitting it costs you applications from people who would have been interested. It prevents reaching offer stage with a gap. And in a growing number of jurisdictions it is becoming a legal requirement anyway.
A range is fine. A very wide range is the same as not publishing one.
Write the way you speak
Job descriptions attract a particular kind of corporate language that nobody uses in conversation. Fast-paced environment. Wear many hats. Rockstar. Synergy. These phrases carry no information and signal that nobody thought carefully about the page.
Write it as you would describe the job to someone at dinner. Read it aloud. Anything you would not say, cut.
Be specific about the arrangement
Remote, hybrid, or on-site. If hybrid, how many days and are they fixed. Which time zone the team works in. Whether travel is expected.
Vagueness here wastes everyone's time. Candidates have firm preferences about this and will discover the answer eventually.
Say something true about the downsides
The most counterintuitive advice, and the most effective.
Every job has difficult parts. A description that mentions none reads as marketing. One that is honest — the systems are legacy, the team is rebuilding after a difficult year, the role involves more stakeholder management than building — reads as credible and attracts people who are fine with it.
It also filters out people who would have left in three months, which is worth more than the applications it costs.
Keep it short
Six hundred words is plenty. Most of what gets cut is boilerplate that applies to every role at the company and tells a candidate nothing.
If there is genuinely more to say, link to it rather than putting it all on the page.
A structure that works
1. One paragraph on what the team does and why the role exists 2. What the person will do in their first six months 3. Three or four genuine requirements 4. Two or three things that would help but are not essential 5. Salary, location, and working arrangement 6. What the process looks like and roughly how long it takes
That last point is rarer than it should be and candidates notice it.
Where to start
Take your most recent job description and delete every requirement you cannot defend. Then write the first-six-months paragraph. Those two changes do most of the work.
Sizanid writes job descriptions as part of running a search, and we will tell you when a specification is the reason a role is not filling. [Start a conversation](/find-talent).
