How To Write A Job Description: An Expert’s Guide

Writing a good job description is a fundamental part of the hiring process. The good news is that it’s not that difficult and you quickly get better with practice.

There are many different formats of job description—informative, mission-driven, role-focused, short-form, or emoji-riddled.

In my opinion, the best ones combine a little of all of these.

Whether you're preparing to hire your first employee or 100th, here's how to write a job description that will attract the right candidates for your roles.

Let’s dive in.

What Is A Job Description?

A job description is a document that outlines the job requirements, skills, qualifications, activities, responsibilities, and duties of a specific role within an organization. It may also include details like the salary range

Sometimes called a 'JD,' the purpose of a job description is to advertise your role to potential candidates and inform them both about the role and your organization.

It should have enough information to pique a job seeker’s interest and motivate them to move forward with the hiring process. It's also a chance to provide a glimpse into your company's culture, mission, and values.

What Should A Job Description Include?

To effectively advertise your role and get the best possible applicants, your JD should include the following info:

1. Job title: Clearly state the job title, which should accurately reflect the position and its level within the organization.
2. Summary of the role: Provide a brief overview of the job, outlining its main purpose and how it fits within the organization.
3. Key responsibilities and duties: List the primary tasks and responsibilities associated with the position. Use bullet points for clarity and start each point with an action verb (e.g., "Manage," "Develop," "Coordinate").
4. Qualifications: Detail the required and preferred qualifications, including education, certifications, and work experience.
5. Skills: List the essential skills and competencies needed for the role, such as technical skills, soft skills, and any specific knowledge areas.
6. Reporting structure: Indicate to whom the position reports and, if applicable, who reports to this position.
7. Working conditions and environment: Describe the work environment, including location, physical demands, and any special conditions (e.g., remote work, travel requirements).
8. Compensation and benefits: Mention the salary range and any additional benefits, such as health insurance, retirement plans, and other perks. This section can sometimes be optional or discussed during the interview process.
9. Company overview: Provide a brief description of the company, including its mission, values, and any unique aspects that might attract candidates.
10. Application instructions: Include details on how to apply, such as submitting a resume, cover letter, and any other required documents. Specify the application deadline if applicable.
11. Equal opportunity statement: Include a statement that the company is an equal opportunity employer, if applicable, to ensure compliance with anti-discrimination laws.
12. Location and work schedule: Mention the job's location and whether it requires full-time, part-time, or flexible hours.
13. Opportunities for growth: Highlight any opportunities for professional development and career advancement within the company.

Attending HR staffing workshops can give you the tools to craft job descriptions that attract high-quality candidates. HR teams attending these workshops often learn how to refine job descriptions to better target the right applicants.

Job Description Structure

Overview—This is a one-two sentence attention grabber, plus a bit more on the conditions and location for the role (e.g. Remote +/- X hrs of this timezone, full-time, 9-month contract).

About the role—this is where information about the position including the responsibilities, how it contributes to organizational success, opportunities for growth, and reporting structure.

About you—this is where the requirements go e.g. qualifications, years of XP, and skills.

About the company—some companies put this at the start, some towards the end, but it’s entirely up to you and your company's journey. This is where your mission and your company culture get to shine.

EEOC statement—in some jurisdictions this is a must, so make sure you have one. In general, there are many examples you can copy. I’m a fan of writing one for your own company, and how diversity and inclusion are part and parcel of the company.

How To Write A Job Description: 4-Step Process

1. Create a simple and easily understood job title

Start with the job title of the role. My mantra is to go for simple and easily understood language.

If there is already a naming convention for a particular role, there is no need to go creative with the job title. Otherwise, people will have trouble identifying their suitability from the title. 

Example: If the role is an Account Manager, call it that rather than a "Customer Relationship Guru" or something.

2. Define responsibilities and outcomes

These are the responsibilities of the role and how they contribute to your organizational goals. Candidates crave this information!

If you are stuck with creating the responsibilities, create a long list of all the job specifications you can think of that the person in this role will have to complete.

You can use a similar framework to the one you’d create for your candidate sourcing strategy to help you structure your thoughts.

Then, shorten the laundry list of job duties you’ve come up with. The goal is to be informative but not to overload with information. 4-6 bullet points for responsibilities, and the same for skills, is a good benchmark.

After deciding on what responsibilities you’re going to include, think back to your mission as a company. Perhaps you have some OKRs or goals for the team that these duties will contribute towards.

Start creating these as outcomes and add them to the list. This way, you can link a specific set of responsibilities to an outcome.

Example

Let's say you're hiring a Tech Talent Partner. You might include these responsibilities and desired outcomes in the job description:

• Source, engage, and screen candidates in the product and engineering space to help us scale from X to XX number in the next 9 months.
• Work with hiring managers to create hiring and onboarding plans and priorities to support scaling and growth, as well as ensure a great experience for the new hires.

Keep linking back to the company mission and why you exist. This creates a sense of belonging for the role and, by extension, a sense of belonging in the potential candidate reading it.

3. Outline the necessary skills and attributes

From there, start thinking about the skills, relevant experience, education, certifications, and attributes required for a person to be considered a qualified candidate.

This really has to be targeted to the audience for your open position.

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Skills and attributes for entry-level roles

If you're hiring for an entry-level role, don't put down 2-3 years of experience in X.

This "needs experience to get experience" catch-22 is so prevalent that it's been turned into a popular meme.

For an entry-level role, focus more on the attributes and ambitions of the prospective candidate. 

Example

For an entry-level admin role, include things like:

• Attention to detail
• Organization
• Ability to prioritize

Experience in these can come in many forms and doesn't necessarily have to stem from previous admin work.

Skills and attributes for non-entry-level roles

For non-entry-level roles, you'll need to include specific experience, requirements, or even qualifications to attract the right candidates.

Specifying the minimum years of experience is a divisive topic. Some companies swear by it, and others prefer to leave it vague.

One pitfall to watch out for, however, is not to ask for more years of experience than the technology has been around, as in the below example:

This one I will leave to you, as I see both sides of the argument. Personally, I do think that a rough guide can be useful to people but should not be treated as gospel, and I lean away from using it.

4. Highlight why your company is a great place to work

The better the candidate, the more career options they have. While it’s important to provide information about the job, it’s just as important to give potential applicants a taste of what your company culture has to offer.

Consider adding a summary and a few bullet points on the following attributes:

• Company mission and values
• Type of work environment (i.e. in-office, remote, or hybrid)
• Perks (i.e. casual dress codes or free lunches on Fridays)
• Benefits packages (i.e. health insurance, dental, and mental health coverage)
• Health and wellness initiatives
• Opportunities for career development
• Vacation and paid time off policies
• Policies around equitable and/or diverse hiring

Remember that your job listing is advertising your company as a whole, and not just the open role.

This is where having a clear employer value proposition (EVP) will help you immeasurably. Essentially an EVP is a set of unique benefits and offerings that an employer promises to deliver to its employees in exchange for their skills, expertise, and commitment. 

It's essentially the value that an organization provides to its employees in return for their contributions.

6 Job Description Best Practices

1. Create a standard job description template

This is where you pull in your employer branding and, ideally, work with your marketing manager. 

You are looking to create an identity where certain things are standardized and recognizable—for example, headings to guide the eye through the page and the company information.

2. Use a consistent tone of voice

The tone of voice is also something that marketing can help you with, as it's a component of an employer's brand identity. If you're not familiar with what I mean by 'tone of voice,' here are a few examples of the role tone plays in job descriptions.

Tone of voice examples

1. You vs passive voice. I am a big fan of using "You" in job descriptions. I think it creates a closeness with the candidate and helps visualize and humanize the experience. This is in contrast to passive voice, which reads instead like, "The ideal candidate for this position shall have..."
2. Formality of language. Some businesses communicate with a very formal tone, and others use more relaxed language—both are fine, and both communicate something about the org's culture. But if your company's tone of voice is informal and your job descriptions read like a Royal Gala invitation, you can unintentionally misrepresent your company and confuse candidates.

3. Keep it simple 

Use simple and accessible language (unless you are talking about specific technical terms). No one will be impressed with you if they need a thesaurus to understand your job description —unless you are hiring a thesaurus writer!

4. Keep it shorter 

Every role has a mountain of duties and tasks to cover. But, if you write out everything you will get a wall of text which few people will read. Bullet points are your best friend, and it is very possible to group some tasks together and summarise them in one bullet point (see the Tech Talent Partner example above).

5. Link responsibilities to outcomes

Try to help the person visualize themselves in the role by linking back the responsibilities to outcomes and the outcomes to team or company goals. You want to make sure that the right candidate is already imagining how they will grow with your company.

6. Experiment

Like with all things recruitment marketing, it pays to keep things fresh and experiment a little. Maybe write a couple of JDs for each role and A/B test to see which performs better regarding the number and, more importantly, the quality of candidates.

You’ll also naturally need to update job descriptions as time goes by and things change within the organization.

5 Things To Watch Out For In A Job Description

1. Filler requirements

I am of the firm belief that if all you write is "great communication skills" or "attention to detail" you don't know the person who needs to be in the role well enough.

You need to think about what kinds of communication skills are required and be more explicit. 

For example, a Product Manager might need to have "demonstrated cross-functional communication skills where they are able to understand business and technical needs alike".

This gives more of guidance.

2. Education requirements

This is a touchy subject but, what I will say is, think about what is absolutely necessary.

If there is a requirement for a specific qualification or certification, it absolutely makes sense to mention it.

But a "2:1 grade minimum from a top 20 university" is incredibly exclusionary. We should try to move away from this practice, especially in the face of so many alternative routes to a career.

3. Exclusionary language

Exclusionary language in job descriptions can deter diverse candidates and create a non-inclusive atmosphere. 

It's important to use inclusive language to attract a broader talent pool, enhance the company's reputation, and ensure legal compliance.

Examples include using gender-neutral terms and avoiding age-specific or culturally biased phrases.

4. Formatting on job boards

Be mindful of how your format may appear on different job boards. Many times I’ve laboured over beautiful headings and bullet point formatting, only for the job board to paste a wall of text when you look at the job posting.

Look around for a preview button, the formatting rules of the job board (usually on the page with the editor), or at least make sure that you view the live posting right after you post to verify formatting. 

5. Salary range

In more and more jurisdictions it's a requirement to post a salary banding or salary range in a JD.

I think this is an interesting move to level the playing field and give more power to candidates when negotiating. 

If you intend to adjust salaries depending on the location of a remote candidate, make sure you specify that.

Tools To Help

Writing a job description from scratch can result in a bad case of 'blank page syndrome,'—the affliction of staring at a blank page and finding your mind has gone equally blank. Here are a few tools that can help you:

Read other job descriptions to get a starting point

As simple as it may sound, if you are truly stuck on getting started with describing a role (seen this happen many times for junior or operational roles), have a look at how other companies are describing it. 

Take a look at a few examples from competitors, and perhaps a few from completely unrelated companies, to see what the similarities and differences are (e.g. if you are a B2B SaaS company, take a look at how consumer goods businesses write about this role).

Use a gender decoder to spot exclusionary language

Studies upon studies have found two major differences in the way men and women apply for jobs. 

Women, on the whole, try to match 100% of the requirements for a role before they apply (hence why you summarise and keep to fewer bullet points) and they are less likely to respond to overly aggressive or exclusionary language.

Recently I saw "He/She will join a 4-man team". Well done on the He/She (better would be You), but then they let themselves down with the 4-man team. Is it a turn of phrase—yes. Can it be exclusionary—also yes.

There are multiple tools for this. Datapeople and Textio are paid tools with advanced functionalities like language decoders and some forms of AI (e.g they recognize turns of phrase) and Genderdecoder is simpler but free.

It may surprise you what can be considered an exclusionary language, especially if you've never needed to scrutinize your writing. A recent study found that language can even impact the average age of your applicants too.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT and other chatbots can help you write job descriptions by providing clear, inclusive, and engaging prose tailored to your needs. When using ChatGPT to write job descriptions, follow these best practices:

1. Provide clear details: Clearly outline the role's responsibilities, required skills, qualifications, and any specific company values or culture points to ensure accurate and relevant content.
2. Focus on Inclusivity: Emphasize the use of inclusive language to attract a diverse range of candidates, avoiding terms that might inadvertently exclude certain groups.
3. Review and edit: Always review and refine the generated content for accuracy, tone, and alignment with your company's voice as outlined in the employer brand.
4. Ensure legal compliance: Check that the language used complies with equal employment opportunity laws and other relevant regulations.

Applicant tracking systems

Lastly, some applicant tracking systems (ATS) also have JD templates you can use and tips on how to optimize your recruiting for SEO so that job ads appear to the right people.

Make sure to check those and, if you do have an internal SEO specialist, perhaps check with them on what else you can do.

Another useful ATS feature is being able to quickly post job descriptions around different jobs boards.

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