Writing a job description that attracts the right people

The typical small-business job description is a list of attributes: self-motivated, detail-oriented, excellent communication skills, able to work independently, team player. None of these tells a reader what they would actually do between arriving and leaving. A candidate reading it cannot picture the work, so they cannot judge whether they would be good at it or want it, and the only people who apply confidently are those who apply to everything.

The reason this shape is so common is that it is written from the wrong starting point. Whoever writes it is thinking about the frustration that prompted the hire — the last person who was disorganised, the thing that keeps being dropped — and that frustration naturally expresses itself as a list of desired traits. But a trait list is unfalsifiable. Every candidate believes they are detail-oriented, so the criterion does no filtering at all, and you receive a pile of applications you have no basis for sorting. Describing the work does filtering automatically, because a person who reads what the job involves and does not want it simply does not apply, which is the cheapest filtering available.

The most useful section, and the one most often missing, is a plain account of the actual work. Not responsibilities in the abstract but what happens: who this person talks to, what arrives on their desk, what they produce, what a normal Tuesday contains. 'Answer around thirty customer calls a day, log each in our system, and escalate anything about a refund to the branch manager' tells a candidate more than a paragraph about communication skills.

Being this concrete does two things at once. It attracts people who want that work rather than people attracted to a job title, and it repels people who would have discovered on week two that the role was not what they imagined — which is a saving for both sides, since a hire who leaves after a month costs you the whole process again. It also forces a useful conversation internally. Writing out what someone will actually do daily frequently reveals that the role as imagined is two different jobs, or that a third of it is work nobody has ever actually specified. Better to discover that before advertising than after someone has accepted.

A short section stating what a person in this role should have achieved by roughly the three-month mark changes the quality of applications noticeably. It might be that they are handling the daily call volume without help, have taken over the weekly reporting, or know the top fifty customers by name. These are checkable, which is the point.

This section is valuable for three separate reasons. Candidates can assess themselves honestly against it, and the strong ones self-select in while the ones who would struggle self-select out. It gives your interviews something concrete to probe, because you can ask directly how a candidate would approach the first of those goals. And it becomes the basis for the probation conversation, so the standard the new hire is assessed against is the same one they read before applying — which is both fairer and considerably easier to discuss than a general impression of whether things are working out. If you cannot write this section, that is worth pausing on. A role whose early success cannot be described is a role where nobody has decided what it is for, and hiring into that reliably disappoints everyone.

Most requirement lists are undifferentiated, and the effect is to deter exactly the candidates you would want. The pattern is well documented in hiring practice: candidates who meet most but not all of a long list often do not apply at all, while candidates who read the same list as aspirational apply regardless. So an inflated list does not raise the standard of your applicant pool, it changes its composition — and not in your favour.

The discipline is to keep must-haves to things where a genuine no is correct. If you would seriously consider a candidate lacking it, it is not a must-have. For most small-business roles the true list is short: a specific licence or qualification where one is legally or practically required, a language the work genuinely demands, availability at the hours the job needs. Everything else — familiarity with a particular software package, experience in your exact industry, a degree — usually belongs under nice-to-have, because it is learnable or substitutable. Listing them separately, under headings that say which is which, tells a candidate how to read them, and that alone widens the pool of people willing to apply.

A requirement list that does not match the compensation on offer is the most common reason a genuine vacancy attracts nobody, and it is usually not deliberate. It happens because the requirements and the salary are decided by different processes: the requirements come from listing everything that would be useful, and the salary comes from what the business can afford. Neither is checked against the other, and the resulting advertisement asks for a senior professional at a junior rate.

The candidates who could meet the requirements read the salary and do not apply. The candidates who apply cannot meet the requirements. The vacancy then sits open, and the natural conclusion — that there is no talent available — is wrong; the advertisement was internally inconsistent. The fix is to decide which of the two is actually fixed. If the budget is fixed, cut the requirements to what that money genuinely buys in your market and plan to train the rest. If the requirements are fixed because the work truly demands them, the budget has to move or the role has to be restructured, perhaps as part-time or contract. Publishing the range also helps here, since it lets candidates self-select rather than both sides discovering the mismatch after two interviews.

A template will give you headings and a serviceable structure, and it is worth using one rather than starting from a blank page. What it cannot give you is the specific content that makes the description work: what this job actually involves in your business, what the first three months should produce, which requirements are real, and what you can genuinely pay. Those are the four things candidates read most carefully and the four a generic template leaves as placeholders.

It is also worth being honest in the description about the parts of the role that are unglamorous. Every job has some, and a description that omits them entirely selects for candidates who are surprised on arrival. Naming them plainly — that the role involves a proportion of repetitive data entry, or occasional weekend cover — costs you a few applications from people who would have left anyway and buys credibility with everyone else. A description that reads as though it were written by someone who has actually done the job is the single most effective thing you can do to attract people capable of doing it, and no amount of polish substitutes for that.