Strong candidates have options.
When a posting is vague, bloated, or full of internal shorthand, they close the tab and apply somewhere that made the decision easier. None of them write back to explain why they left.
Fixing a job description usually takes an afternoon per role. Find out which problems cost the most, and how to tell whether the rewrite changed anything.
What a Weak Posting Costs You
Candidates form an opinion of the employer before a recruiter sends a single message.
LinkedIn has reported that 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before applying, and its guidance for hiring teams notes that most candidates take about 14 seconds to decide whether to keep reading a job post. Typos, vague duties, and copy-pasted boilerplate tell that candidate the team behind the post is just as disorganized.
The second cost shows up inside the applicant tracking system. A posting that never says what the role involves attracts people who have to guess.
It’s common for a recruiter to work through a few hundred résumés after a vague post goes live and find a handful worth a phone screen. Meanwhile, the person who would have been an ideal hire read “drive strategic initiatives across the business,” couldn’t picture the job, and applied elsewhere.
These costs stack. More screening slows the shortlist. A slower shortlist stretches time-to-fill. And in a slow process, the best candidates are usually the first to accept another offer.
Titles Candidates Can’t Find
People search for job titles they already know. “Customer Happiness Ninja” matches almost no searches. “Customer Success Manager” matches thousands.
Browse our extensive list of job titles people search for.
Internal titles cause the same problem from a different direction. “Associate II, GTM Ops” means something to the org chart and very little to a qualified operations analyst scrolling a job board.
When a title needs more detail, add it plainly: “Senior Data Engineer, Payments” gives a candidate the level, the function, and the domain in four words.
Requirement Lists That Shrink Your Pool
Requirement lists grow by accumulation.
The hiring manager adds everything the last person in the seat could do. An old HR template contributes a degree requirement that may not relate to the expertise or framed diplomas of current candidates. A team lead adds two tools they’d like the new hire to know. Nobody takes anything out, and the final list has 14 requirements that no one currently on the team fully meets.
Candidates read that list literally. A marketer with six years of strong B2B demand generation work sees “8+ years required” and “Marketo certification” and decides she isn’t eligible, even though she could run the program better than most of the people who do apply.
The loss falls unevenly.
The often-cited finding that women apply only when they meet 100% of the listed qualifications has more nuance than the headline version, and Harvard Business Review’s analysis of why many women don’t apply unless they feel fully qualified is worth reading in full.
The takeaway still holds. Inflated or unclear requirements reduce applications, and LinkedIn’s analysis of 4.5 million job posts found that women already apply to the jobs they view less often than men.
A typical bloated list for a marketing role looks like this:
- Bachelor’s degree in Marketing required, MBA preferred
- 8+ years of B2B marketing experience
- Expert in Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Tableau, and SQL
- Experience managing a team of 10+
- Background in SaaS, fintech, and healthcare
A tighter version keeps the bar high and makes it readable:
Must-haves:
- Has planned and run multi-channel B2B campaigns tied to pipeline targets
- Can manage a monthly paid budget in the $50K range and report on return
- Comfortable in at least one marketing automation platform
- Has managed or mentored at least one marketer
Could-haves:
- SaaS experience
- Working knowledge of SQL or a BI tool
A few rules make this repeatable:
- Keep must-haves to four to six items. A longer list almost always contains preferences.
- Keep nice-to-haves to two to four items and label them clearly.
- For each requirement, ask whether someone without it could succeed in the first six months. If the answer is yes, move it or cut it.
- Keep degree and years-of-experience requirements only when law, licensing, or real risk demands them, and say so when that is the reason.
- Describe capabilities. “Can manage a $50K monthly paid search budget” gives a candidate a concrete bar to measure against. “5+ years of PPC experience” only tells them how long to have been doing it.
Kellon Ambrose, Managing Director of Electric Wheelchairs USA, an online retailer of electric wheelchairs, mobility scooters, and power chair accessories, hires product specialists based on what they need to handle on a customer call.
He says, “Our posting lists the actual tasks. A specialist explains the difference between a folding travel chair and a heavy-duty model, checks whether a chair will fit through a customer’s doorways, and walks a caregiver through battery rules for flying. We removed the medical sales experience requirement a while ago. Some of our strongest specialists came from general retail, and they learned the product line quickly because they were good at listening to what the customer needed.”
An honest split between essentials and extras also affects retention. People hired against an accurate description of the day-to-day work are the ones who stay.
Language That Signals Who Belongs
Words like “aggressive,” “dominant,” “rockstar,” and “crush your targets” read as neutral to the person writing them. Many readers take them as a description of a specific kind of team, and some conclude they wouldn’t fit on it.
Research on gendered wording in job advertisements found that masculine-coded language made jobs less appealing to women, largely because it lowered their sense that they would belong in the role.
Some straightforward swaps:
- “Aggressive growth targets” → “ambitious growth targets”
- “Dominate the market” → “grow our market share”
- “Rockstar” or “ninja” → the actual job title
- “Work hard, play hard” → a plain description of hours and team events
Atlassian ran its job ads through Textio to remove gendered wording and, alongside other recruiting changes, raised the share of women in its technical graduate intake from about 10% to 57% in two years.
Insider acronyms belong on the same list. They tell outsiders the posting was written for people who already work there.
Pay, Location, and Flexibility
Leaving out the salary range costs trust, and in several places it now costs compliance. Colorado, California, and New York City all require pay ranges in job postings, and each has published guidance on what that means for employers (Colorado, California, New York City). Where it isn’t required, candidates expect it anyway.
Buffer has published its salary formula and the salaries of its team since 2013, which shows how far an employer can take pay openness.
Location needs the same precision. “Hybrid” on its own tells a candidate very little. “Hybrid, three days a week in our Austin office, with Fridays remote” lets them decide in one read. State working hours, remote eligibility by country or state, and whether the company offers visa sponsorship.
Gareth Edwards, General Manager of Fox Family Heating & Air Conditioning, a residential heating, cooling, and indoor air quality company, oversees hiring for HVAC service technicians and installers.
He says, “Every technician who calls us asks the same three things: the hourly range, how the on-call rotation works, and whether the service van goes home with them. We put all three in the posting now. The calls we get come from techs who have already decided the pay and schedule work for them, so the first conversation is about their experience instead of the basics.”
Showing the Actual Work
“Responsible for cross-functional collaboration” could describe half the roles in any company. A candidate reading it learns nothing about what their week will look like.
Outcomes give them something to picture. Compare that line with this one: “In your first 90 days, you’ll move our revenue reporting from spreadsheets into Looker, set up a weekly pipeline review with the sales leads, and help cut the monthly close from eight days to five.”
A strong candidate reads the second version and knows whether they’ve done similar work before.
Context matters just as much.
People want to know what the company does, where the role sits, and who they’ll work with. “You’ll report to the Director of Revenue Operations and work alongside two analysts and a Salesforce admin” takes one sentence and answers questions that would otherwise come up on a screening call or stop someone from applying.
Put the essentials at the top: title, a one-sentence purpose for the role, where it fits in the organization, location and flexibility, and the salary range.
Length and Layout
A wall of text drives readers off the page. A two-line posting fails in the other direction, because it gives candidates nothing to trust.
Write in second person. Keep sentences short and cut filler. Use section headers, bullet the responsibilities and qualifications, and link to the interview process so candidates know what the next four weeks will involve.
Before publishing, check whether a qualified stranger could read the posting in 30 seconds and understand what the job is, why it matters, and whether they might be a fit.
A Template Worth Standardizing
A shared template keeps quality consistent across hiring managers. A solid one includes:
- Job title
- One to two sentences on the purpose of the role
- Team context and reporting line
- Four to six core responsibilities
- Four to six must-haves
- Two to four nice-to-haves
- Salary range and benefits
- Location and flexibility
- What success looks like at 90 days or six months
- Interview steps
- EEO statement
SHRM’s job description templates are a reasonable starting point to adapt to your organization.
Tools That Catch What You Miss
Writing assistants, bias scanners, and templates can flag problem language and tighten structure in minutes, which turns job description writing into a repeatable process.
AI-first customer support tools like Kayako, which stands out as a great alternative to Zendesk and Intercom, can also help teams manage customer-facing workflows more efficiently.
Tools worth knowing:
- Ongig Text Analyzer flags biased or exclusionary words, overly complex sentences, and structural issues, and helps standardize a template library.
- Textio uses augmented writing to improve clarity and inclusivity. Its customer stories include companies reporting better applicant quality and more diverse applicant pools after revising their job ads.
- Gender Decoder runs a quick scan for masculine- and feminine-coded words.
- Datapeople (formerly TapRecruit) provides analytics and guidance on readability and hiring outcomes.
- Digital.gov’s plain language guides carry forward the writing guidance that used to live on PlainLanguage.gov.
Running every posting through a language and bias scanner should be as routine as running spellcheck.
Measuring Whether the Rewrite Worked
Start with the last 10 postings your team published. Mark every piece of jargon, every missing pay range or location detail, and every requirement list longer than six items. The same problems usually repeat across roles, which tells you what to fix in the template.
Then test. Run “Account Executive” against “Sales Account Executive” and compare engagement. Try two versions of the opening paragraph and see which one produces more qualified applications, since total volume can rise while quality falls.
Ask for feedback from both ends of the process:
- New hires, on whether the posting matched the job they walked into
- Applicants, on which parts of the posting were confusing
Track the numbers that show whether the posting is doing its job:
- Qualified apply rate
- Apply-to-interview rate
- Time-to-fill
- Source-of-hire quality
- Diversity of the applicant pool
- Drop-off points in the application funnel
Review these after every revision. A posting that gets rewritten once and then left alone for three years will drift out of step with the role it describes.
For teams rebuilding their templates, Ongig is a practical place to find wording and structure to adapt.
