The job description that actually helps you recruit

Echipa HR 365 · reviewed 2026-09-04 · 5 min read

A job description that is useful for recruiting is written from what the person does in an ordinary week, not from titles and general duties. The test is simple: if yours fits a post at another company just as well, it describes nothing.

These are two documents, not one

The confusion that produces the worst adverts: the internal job description and the recruitment advert have different purposes. The first describes the role fully, for whoever holds it; the second selects, for somebody who knows nothing about you yet. The second is written from the first, not the other way round.

The five sections

In the order they are written

1. 1. The result — what has to exist after six months for the hire to have been a good one — one sentence, not a list
2. 2. The real work — the four or five things that take the most time, with approximate percentages
3. 3. The decisions — what they decide alone and what they escalate; the most frequently missing section
4. 4. The hard requirements — strictly what cannot be learned in the first months — everything else goes to “would help”
5. 5. The context — who they report to, who they work with daily, what team, what schedule

Requirements: the short list that counts

The most frequent error in adverts is a long requirements list in which even the author no longer knows which are mandatory. The effect is doubly bad: suitable candidates missing one point do not apply, while those who apply to anything do so regardless.

The test for each requirement: if an excellent candidate appeared tomorrow, strong on everything else but lacking this, would you reject them? If the answer is “it depends”, the requirement is not a hard one and drops into the “would help” section.

The verification test, in three questions

1. If I delete the company name and the role name, can you guess what this is about? If not, the description is generic.
2. Would somebody doing this work now recognise themselves in it? Show it to a person in the role and ask what is missing.
3. Can a candidate work out for themselves that it does not suit them? If not, you will do the filtering yourself, at interview, with far more time spent.

The second question is the most productive and takes ten minutes. Whoever does the work now will almost always add two or three things that take a lot of time and appear in no description — usually the administrative side and coordination with other teams.

When it gets updated

At every recruitment for that post, not once every three years. The right moment is just before publishing the advert: the role has changed since the last hire, and the difference is fresh in the mind of whoever is leaving, or of the manager.

The salary range: to publish or not

There is no universal answer, but there is a criterion: look at what competitors do for that role, in your market. If most publish a range, its absence reads as a negative signal and loses candidates before first contact. If nobody publishes, publishing becomes a differentiating advantage.

What you lose by not publishing is hard to see, precisely because it is lost before the application: suitable candidates who already have an offer do not invest time in a process where they cannot tell whether the range is close. What you gain is flexibility in negotiation — a real gain, paid for in the volume and quality of applications.

Three phrasings that drive away exactly the good candidates

The third is the most expensive. Years of experience are a poor substitute for competence: somebody with three years on exactly what you need is often a better fit than somebody with eight on something else, and the years filter removes the first without you ever seeing them.

Where to start

Take the job description you are recruiting on now and show it to somebody who does that work. The two or three things they add are usually exactly what was missing.

Then run each requirement through the test: would you reject a candidate excellent at everything else? Whatever fails drops into the “would help” list — usually half of it.

Finally, add the section with percentages on the real work. It is the only one that helps candidates rule themselves out correctly, so the only one that reduces your volume of pointless interviews.