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

Hiring the right candidate can feel like finding a needle in a haystack—especially when your inbox is flooded with applications that miss the mark. 

Hands up if you’ve ever felt frustrated by a mountain of irrelevant resumes or endured countless interviews with under-qualified candidates.

The root cause might be closer than you think: your job description.

A poorly written job description is more than just an inconvenience—it’s a productivity drain.

It sets off a chain reaction of wasted time, from screening unsuitable applicants to conducting dead-end interviews. Every hour spent untangling this web is time lost that could be invested elsewhere in your business.

The good news? You have the power to change this. Crafting a clear, compelling, and precise job description is one of the most effective ways to attract the right talent from the start. 

While it may seem like a time-consuming task up front, a well-written job description can save you significant time, energy, and resources down the line.

As a writer of more JDs than I care to remember, I’ll show you how to write a job description that resonates with the talent you want, reduces hiring headaches, and streamlines your recruitment process.

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 turn job postings from a recruitment hurdle into a strategic hiring tool.

What Is A Job Description?

A job description is a document that outlines the essential details of a job role including specific duties, responsibilities, requirements, as well as some info about the org. 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 serves as a guide for both potential candidates and also hiring managers and other members of the hiring team.

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 and helps align expectations between employers and employees.

Components Of A Job Description

Job title

Clearly state the job title, which should accurately reflect the position and its level within the organization.

Examples: Chief Operating Officer (COO), Marketing Director, Senior Software Engineer, Sales Team Lead, Human Resources Coordinator, Customer Service Representative.

Job Purpose

Provide a brief overview of the job, outlining its main purpose and how it fits within the organization.

Job Duties and Responsibilities

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").

Required Qualifications

Detail the required qualifications, including education, certifications, depth of experience and skills.

Education

Specify the educational qualifications necessary for an employee to effectively perform the job’s duties and responsibilities. Clearly state the relevant fields of study, degree types, or specific concentrations that provide the required knowledge for success in this role.

Experience

Specify the minimum years of full-time work experience required for the role, along with the relevant types of experience needed for qualification.

If internships, undergraduate work experience, or graduate assistantships are considered acceptable, clearly indicate these as qualifying experience.

Knowledge, skills and abilities

Clearly define the level of knowledge required for entry into the position by specifying the depth of understanding needed. Use the following definitions as a guide:

• Working knowledge: Basic understanding of principles and terminology, enabling the resolution of simple problems.
• General knowledge: Proficiency in the field sufficient to handle standard tasks and typical work situations, including familiarity with key aspects of the subject.
• Thorough knowledge: Advanced understanding of the subject, allowing for the resolution of complex problems, technical advising, and serving as a resource to others.
• Comprehensive knowledge: Expert-level mastery, involving deep comprehension, innovative thinking, and the development of new concepts or approaches (use this level sparingly for highly specialized roles).

Additionally, list specific skills and abilities essential for success in the role and include any required licenses or certifications.

Preferred qualifications

An expanded list of preferred qualifications can help further assess a candidate’s potential for success and productivity in the role.

While not essential for performing the job’s core responsibilities, these qualifications enhance a candidate’s ability to excel. 

Preferred Qualifications are considered “nice to have” including additional education, relevant experience, specialized knowledge, advanced skills, and specific abilities that align with the role’s goals and organizational needs.

Including such criteria provides a clearer picture of an ideal candidate while allowing flexibility in the hiring process.

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Working conditions

Describe the working conditions and physical demands directly related to the essential duties of the job to ensure compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 

Specify the type, intensity (level of exertion), frequency (how often), and duration (length of time) of the required physical or mental capabilities.

Consider the following factors:

• Work environment: Specify whether the job is performed indoors (e.g., office) or outdoors, and mention relevant environmental settings.
• Exposure risks: Note any exposure to hazardous materials, extreme temperatures, loud noise, or other environmental risks.
• Physical requirements: Include essential physical tasks such as climbing, standing, stooping, bending, or typing.
• Lifting/physical effort: Define the level of physical effort required:
  • Sedentary: Up to 10 pounds
  • Light: Up to 20 pounds
  • Medium: Up to 50 pounds
  • Heavy: Over 50 pounds
• Work schedule: Indicate if the role requires working nights, weekends, or being on-call regularly.
• Location and travel requirements: Specify the location and if travel is required, including frequency and destinations if applicable.
• Emergency staff designation: Clarify if the position is considered essential during emergencies or critical operations.

This information ensures job expectations are clearly defined while supporting an inclusive and compliant hiring process.

Company mission, vision and values

Clearly state the organization’s mission, vision, and core values to convey your purpose and long-term goals.

This helps candidates understand the company’s guiding principles, cultural expectations, and how their role contributes to overall success.

Salary, perks, bonuses

Consider outlining the salary, perks, and bonus structure associated with the role to set transparent expectations for candidates. 

You might want to include a salary range, benefits, bonuses and commission structure, and perks you offer.

Clearly communicating these aspects ensures candidates understand the total compensation package and can assess the role’s full value.

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 use 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

Next outline 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.

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.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. For, example, if hiring 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 thThis 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, it’s just a fact.

So, 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. 

Think of it as the value that an organization provides to its employees in return for their contributions.

Writing A 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’s 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 number and, more importantly, 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. Vague or outright ridiculous job requirements are a quick turn off to top talent.

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 a guidance.

2. Educational 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 languages 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.

Chat GPT

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.

Example prompt:

"Please write a detailed job description for the role of [Job Title]. Include a compelling job overview, key responsibilities, required qualifications (education, experience, skills), preferred qualifications, working conditions, physical demands, and any relevant perks or benefits. Tailor the tone to be [professional/casual/engaging] and align the content with industry standards."

Applicant tracking systems

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

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