How to Write a Job Description That Attracts Skilled Candidates

A job description has one job: help the right candidates apply, and help the wrong ones realise they should not.

Most do the opposite. They narrow the applicant pool for the wrong reasons ("three years of experience," "fast-paced environment," "cultural fit"), miss the candidates who could actually do the work, and attract a long tail of applicants who self-selected on personality words instead of skills.

Take the three-years-of-experience requirement, probably the most common filter in any job description. An accountant with three years at a construction company does completely different work from an accountant with three years at a tech startup. Same title, same tenure, different job descriptions. Filtering on time served is filtering on a proxy that does not measure what you actually need to know about the candidate.

The previous piece in this series (Resume Screening Is the Weakest Hiring Signal You Have) argued that specificity is the mechanism that makes skills-based hiring work. The same mechanism applies here. A vague job description attracts a vague applicant pool. A specific one helps candidates self-select on whether they can actually do the work, before either side has spent any time on screening.

This piece walks through what most job descriptions get wrong, what the good ones do instead, and why the payoff is not only diversity (though it is that too), but better candidates, less wasted screening, and better hires.

Three years of experience is not a skill. It is a proxy for one. The job description is where you stop using proxies.

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What most job descriptions get wrong

Three mistakes show up in almost every weak job description. Each one quietly narrows the applicant pool, biases who applies, and makes screening harder.

1. Character traits instead of behaviours

Natural leader. Gifted communicator. Strategic thinker. High energy. Independent thinker.

Job descriptions stuffed with character traits read like horoscopes. Each phrase feels innate and unlearnable. Candidates who do not see themselves in that vocabulary self-select out, even when they could do the work.

The harder problem is that traits are untestable. You cannot screen on "natural leader." There is no observable evidence behind the phrase. So when the applications arrive, the hiring team has no way to evaluate against the criteria they themselves wrote. The job description ends up being decorative.

The replacement is straightforward: every trait can be re-stated as a behaviour.

Natural leader becomes you have line management responsibilities for a team of three to five.

Gifted communicator becomes you have presented findings to clients or at conferences.

Strategic thinker becomes you have owned the roadmap for a product or business function.

Behaviours are specific, observable, and testable. They give candidates something concrete to map their experience against, and they give the hiring team something concrete to screen on.

Character traits feel innate. Behaviours are testable. If you cannot observe it, do not list it.

2. Chaos boasting

Fast-paced environment. Wear many hats. Comfortable with ambiguity. Thrive in chaos. Roll up your sleeves.

This language is meant to sound exciting. It reads, to anyone with options, as: we do not have our shit together and we want you to figure out our stuff.

The best candidates are the ones with the most leverage. They read chaos boasting and self-select out. They are not afraid of fast environments. They are afraid of working in companies that mistake disorganisation for ambition. The candidates who remain after the chaos filter are often the ones who do not know they have leverage in the first place.

This is the most expensive trap in the list, because it is the one that costs you your best hires.

Chaos boasting does not cast a wider net. It closes your own funnel.

There is a version of this pattern that is honest and works: naming the specific operating conditions of the role. Early-stage company, two-person founding team, you will be the third hire. You will set up the first version of the customer support function. We can describe what good looks like at six months but not at week two. That is honest description. Wear many hats is not.

3. Undefined "cultural fit"

Looking for a cultural fit. Person-organisation fit. Values alignment.

If you cannot name the specific behaviours that constitute your culture, "cultural fit" is bias by another name. It usually means similar to the people we already have, which narrows the pool to lookalikes without ever saying so.

This is not a soft criticism. The CIPD's evidence-based Inclusive Recruitment guide for employers recommends, in plain language, that employers avoid a requirement for cultural fit or person-organisation fit. The guidance sits inside a broader recommendation that role requirements be "clear, specific, and behaviour-based."

There is a defensible version of cultural fit, and it lives in the competency framework (a written list of the skills a role requires, each with the specific evidence that demonstrates it). If your culture is "we give and receive direct feedback in writing, we own outcomes without escalation, and we default to async communication," then those are three specific behaviours that can be tested for and asked about. They belong in the competency framework as evidence-bearing indicators. They do not belong as the catch-all phrase "cultural fit" in the job description.

If you can name the behaviours, list the behaviours. If you cannot name them, you are not screening for culture. You are screening for similarity.

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What good job descriptions do instead

The fix is not subtle. Replace each trap with its specific equivalent.

1. Replace character traits with behaviours

The clearest single change you can make to a job description is to rewrite every adjective as a verb. A few worked examples:

• Natural leader → You have line management responsibilities for a team of three to five engineers.
• Gifted communicator → You have presented technical findings to non-technical audiences (clients, conferences, board meetings).
• Strategic thinker → You have owned the multi-quarter roadmap for a product, function, or P&L.
• Self-starter → You have shipped a project end-to-end with limited supervision, including scoping, execution, and outcome measurement.
• Detail-oriented → You have built or maintained a process where errors carry real cost (reconciliation, audit, regulatory compliance, etc.).

Each rewritten line tells the candidate two things at once: what the role actually involves, and what evidence they should be ready to provide. It also tells the hiring team what to screen on. The job description becomes a working document, not a decoration.

2. Show the actual work with a day-in-the-life

Most job descriptions describe the role at the wrong level of abstraction. A list of responsibilities ("manage the customer support function") is too high. A list of tasks ("respond to tickets") is too low. The right level is a day-in-the-life or week-in-the-life: what does this person actually do, hour to hour, week to week, in this specific company.

A useful day-in-the-life passage answers three questions: who do you talk to, what do you produce, and what does success look like by Friday. Candidates can picture themselves in the role. They self-select more accurately. They show up to interviews with informed questions, which makes the interviews better and faster.

3. Show the company honestly

Include direct links to your LinkedIn, Instagram, careers page, and any public company resources. There are two reasons for this.

First, candidates do this research anyway. Making it easy is a small kindness that compounds across the entire candidate pool.

Second, it is a transparency signal. Companies that hide are companies with something to hide. Companies that link directly to their public presence are saying here is what we actually look like. The candidates who care about culture (which is almost everyone now) will self-select in or out before they apply, which is exactly what you want.

This is not optional content for skilled candidates. They are evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them.

4. Advertise specific perks and policies

We offer flexible working is a marketing line. Remote-first, four-day week with Fridays off, $1,500 home-office stipend, no Slack messages outside 9-5 in your timezone is an offer.

Specifics signal a real offer. Vague benefit lists signal that the benefits are a wishlist. The CIPD guidance explicitly recommends advertising specific benefits and policies, offering flexible working by default, and including salary in adverts. Each of these recommendations narrows the gap between what the candidate expects on day one and what they actually find.

The retention impact is real. Mismatch on perks and policies is one of the most common reasons skilled hires leave within their first year.

5. If you want cultural fit, define it as competencies

Drop the phrase. Replace it with the specific behaviours your culture requires.

A worked example. Instead of writing "looking for a cultural fit," write: We expect everyone here to give and receive direct feedback in writing, own outcomes without waiting for escalation, and default to async communication. You should be able to point to examples of doing each of these things at a previous role.

Now it is testable. Now it is defensible. Now it sits inside the competency framework, where it belongs.

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Why this matters (employer-first framing)

It is tempting to read everything above as a diversity argument. It is one. The CIPD guide and the broader inclusive recruitment literature make that case in detail, and the case is solid: biased and chaos-coded language narrows the demographic pool that applies, which is a real cost to a hiring team that wants to choose from the widest possible set of qualified candidates.

But the employer benefit is just as concrete, and it is the framing founders should pay closest attention to:

• A wider applicant pool means more skilled candidates apply. Biased and chaos-coded language filters out qualified people before they ever submit. You are not "casting a wide net." You are closing your own funnel.
• Honest job descriptions mean candidates self-select better. Less time screening people who were never the right fit. Fewer wasted interview slots. Less ghosting after offer.
• Specific job descriptions mean clearer screening downstream. When the behaviours and competencies already live in the JD, the screening process inherits the structure for free. The same vocabulary that attracted the right candidate is the vocabulary that screens for them.

Diversity is a co-benefit of writing better job descriptions. It is not the reason to do it. The reason to do it is that a vague job description does not cast a wider net. It closes your own funnel.

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The specificity through-line

A vague job description is the same problem as a vague resume:

• It rewards what is easy to claim, not what is hard to fake.
• It produces a pool of candidates self-selected on personality words, not skills.
• It makes downstream screening harder because the criteria were never anchored in evidence.

A specific job description does not just attract better candidates. It sets up the entire hiring funnel to operate on evidence rather than personality. The behaviours you list in the JD become the indicators you screen for in the framework. The day-in-the-life becomes the basis for the structured interview. The specific perks you advertise become the retention promise you keep on day 30. Specificity at the top of the funnel compounds.

Resume specificity catches what candidates exaggerate. Job description specificity catches what employers leave undefined.

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Before and after: one job description, two versions

To make the contrast concrete, here is one role written twice.

The vague version

Senior Product Manager

We are a fast-paced, high-energy startup looking for a natural leader who thrives in ambiguity. You will wear many hats, work cross-functionally, and drive strategy from day one. We are looking for a self-starter who can take ownership of complex problems and deliver results. Cultural fit and a passion for our mission are essential.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of PM experience
• Strategic thinker with strong analytical skills
• Gifted communicator
• Comfortable in a fast-paced environment

We offer competitive compensation, flexible working, and great team culture.

This is recognizable. Most product manager job descriptions on most company sites read like this. It is also doing none of the work a job description should do. There is no role, no work, no test of fit, no honest description of the company.

The specific version

Senior Product Manager, Onboarding

You will own the onboarding flow that takes new customers from sign-up to first value. The current flow converts at 34%. Your first year is a redesign and a measured rebuild of that flow, with the goal of clearing 55%.

A typical week:

• Monday: review last week's funnel metrics with the data analyst, identify the top two drop-off points
• Tuesday to Wednesday: pair with a designer and an engineer to scope the next change
• Thursday: ship or schedule the change, write the experiment plan
• Friday: review with the team, write the weekly update

You will report to the VP Product. You will have one designer and two engineers dedicated to this flow. You will not have direct reports in year one.

What you should be ready to point to:

• A funnel you have measured, owned, and improved (please bring numbers)
• A multi-quarter roadmap you have written and shipped against
• An example of a customer-facing decision you got wrong, and what you did when you noticed

About us: we are a 14-person SaaS company, four years old, profitable, headquartered in [city], remote-first. Our public side: [LinkedIn], [Instagram], [careers]. Salary: $X to $Y. Benefits: four-day week with Fridays off, $1,500 home-office stipend, full health coverage, no Slack outside 9-5 in your timezone.

The difference is not subtle. A candidate reading the second version knows whether they want to apply within sixty seconds, and the hiring team knows what to screen on the moment the application arrives. Both versions are roughly the same length. Only one of them does the work.

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Doing this in 30 minutes

Writing a job description the way this piece describes is straightforward in principle and tedious in practice. By hand, the specific version takes an afternoon: an hour or two to identify the right skills, more time to translate them into behaviours, then the day-in-the-life, then the perks and social links, then the apply page.

You can also use a tool that handles the work for you. Workcraft takes the role, your inputs about what the work actually involves, and the public information about your company, and produces the competency framework, the job description, the day-in-the-life, the social links, and the apply page with the knockout questions (short, role-specific questions that ask candidates for concrete evidence) tied to each competency. Start to finish, in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Either path gets you a job description that does the work this piece is about. The choice is whether you want to build it yourself or hand it to a tool built for it.

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The job description is the first specificity test in your hiring funnel. Most teams treat it as a list of requirements. Treat it as the tool that helps the right candidates apply and the wrong ones realise they should not, written in behaviours rather than character traits, and the rest of the funnel gets easier in three places at once: more skilled candidates apply, fewer wrong-fit candidates apply, and the screening process inherits the structure you set at the top.

If you want one action from this piece, it is this: open the next job description you are about to publish, and rewrite every adjective as a verb. Stop there if you do nothing else.

See The Complete Guide to Skills-Based Hiring for how to build the competency framework that the JD draws from, and Resume Screening Is the Weakest Hiring Signal You Have for why the specificity in the JD is the same specificity that screens out vague claims downstream. Once the job description brings applicants in, Candidate Screening: How to Evaluate Skills Before Resumes covers how to screen them on skills.

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Frequently asked questions

Q1: What is wrong with words like "fast-paced," "rockstar," or "high-energy" in a job description?

These words are marketing language pretending to be requirements. They communicate that the company sees itself as exciting and demanding, but they do not describe the actual work. To skilled candidates with options, they read as a warning sign: a company that brands chaos as a feature is usually a company without enough structure to support the role. The candidates you want are the ones with leverage, and they consistently filter these phrases out. Replace them with specific operating conditions: team size, role scope, what the first 90 days actually look like, what success looks like by quarter end.

Q2: Is "cultural fit" ever an acceptable requirement?

Only when it is defined as a list of specific behaviours and moved into the competency framework. If your culture is "we give and receive direct feedback in writing, we own outcomes without escalation, and we default to async communication," those are three testable behaviours you can screen for. The phrase "cultural fit" by itself, with no behavioural definition, is not a hiring criterion. It is a proxy for bias, and the CIPD's inclusive recruitment guide specifically recommends avoiding it.

Q3: How long should a good job description be?

Long enough to do the work, short enough to read in five minutes. The vague version of a job description is often shorter than the specific version, but the specific version reads faster because the reader does not have to translate marketing language into actual requirements. Aim for the specific job description to be skimmable: clear headings, a day-in-the-life paragraph, a behaviour-led requirements list, a transparent compensation and benefits section. If the role is complex, expand the day-in-the-life. If the role is simple, the JD will be short on its own.

Q4: Should I list a salary in the job description?

Yes. The CIPD inclusive recruitment guidance recommends making salaries non-negotiable and including them in job adverts. Salary disclosure narrows the application pool to candidates who would actually accept the offer, which saves both sides time. It also signals transparency, which is itself a filter for candidates who value it. Companies that hide salary ranges almost always lose negotiation leverage on offer day, because the candidates who reach the offer stage are often the ones who would have negotiated more aggressively against a hidden range.

Q5: Can AI write a good job description?

AI can write a generic job description that reads well. It cannot write a specific job description without the inputs that make a job description specific: the team you are hiring into, the actual outcomes the role owns, the real day-to-day, the perks you actually offer. Tools like Workcraft work because they collect those inputs first (company research, role context, competency framework, perks) and then generate a JD with the specifics already baked in. Generic AI writing tools, given only the role title, will produce a job description that sounds polished and is structurally indistinguishable from the vague version above.

Q6: Does this apply to small companies, or only to large ones with HR?

It applies more to small companies. Large companies can afford to absorb the cost of a vague job description through volume: when a thousand people apply, the hiring team can sort through them. Small companies cannot afford that. A 14-person company that posts a vague PM role and gets 200 applications is now spending two weeks they do not have screening applications that should have self-selected out at the JD stage. The specificity discount in time-to-hire is most valuable to teams under 100 people.