The Secret to Writing Job Descriptions That Attract Your Ideal Candidates

Everyone knows how competitive the job market has become in recent years. With fewer openings and more applicants, every job post leads to an overwhelming number of responses.

On the surface, it doesn’t sound half bad having a lot of candidates to choose from, but when you have dozens of résumés sitting on your desk, you end up wasting your time wading through one unqualified applicant after another.

Instead of spending your time digging through pages of mediocrity, doesn’t it seem more efficient to choose among fewer candidates who are more qualified? With a well-written job posting, you can do just that.

Cutting Through the Clutter

With a properly worded job description, you’ll benefit from having fewer applicants to consider and more high-quality applicants in the pipeline, allowing you to spend less time on the hiring process and more time on your day-to-day operations.

When writing your job description, there are a number of things you can do to make sure your post weeds out the unqualified applicants:

• Be specific. You need to be clear about what you’re looking for. Don’t be wishy-washy when it comes to required skills. If you need someone who knows how to do X, just come out and say it.

• Write with personality. Write your posting the way you would write about your company. It gives a glimpse into your company’s culture, attracting the right candidates while dissuading the wrong candidates from applying.

• Be transparent. Clearly explain what your company is like. Talk about the tools and processes that are in place. If you want remote teammates, say so. If you don’t, make that clear.

• Be intentional. A lot of descriptions list every skill set that could possibly be required. Instead, focus on what is actually needed to do the job. List the skills that will be used often, and let them know that there are skills that may only be used occasionally.

• Ask for more than a résumé. Every job seeker has a résumé. It’s easy for a job seeker to send in a résumé (good and bad). Instead, ask job seekers to do something more. Typically, we have them answer a handful of short questions. The bad candidates skip over this, the good ones answer them, and the best ones provide amazing responses.

Where to Post

Part of finding the best candidates involves where you post your job ads. From my experience, most job boards don’t let you showcase your company and the position you have open. They want your posting to match their site’s personality, rather than your company’s. When I post to a job board, I simply use it to drive applicants back to my own site, where I can better showcase what the position and company are all about.

When it comes to using networking sites, don’t blanket the web; post where your ideal candidates are likely to hang out. You shouldn’t post a marketing role on Stack Overflow because that’s a platform for developers.

You can also use social networking sites to reach out to candidates who are already in positions similar to the one you’re hiring for. They’re likely to have recommendations for quality applicants, or they can at least share your post with their network of like-minded people.

Writing an Effective Job Description

My company strives to write job descriptions that provide all of the pertinent information about a job while simultaneously weeding out unqualified applicants.

• Tell them about the day-to-day: “Most of what you’ll do on a daily basis is helping answer key questions about the business by extracting data sets, then running analysis on the data sets to find out things we didn’t know about our customers or our business.”

• Explain what type of company you are: “We’re a startup, so you’ll likely get your hands dirty with a little bit of everything. That said, here are some things you’ll get to lead…”

• Tell them about your structure: “We believe in small teams. Small teams are fast and nimble. Small teams mean less bureaucracy, less management, and more getting things done.”

• Share your philosophy: “We believe that credentials are not needed. Our head of development has a finance degree. Our head of business and marketing has an engineering degree. Our head of design has a mechanical engineering degree. What you love doing is way more important than the credentials you have.”

This posting is effective because it gives a clear indication of the culture applicants should expect — open, experimental, and a little eclectic — while being very clear about what the position entails.

There are people who would be turned off by the tone of the post, but there are others who would get excited and say, “Wow! This is the perfect fit for me!” That should be your goal every time you write a job posting.

Use your job description to narrow your pool of applicants and attract just the right people to your company. You don’t want everyone in the world to be able to look at it and think, “I guess I could do that job.” You want them to apply, feeling excited about it — or immediately look elsewhere. Chances are, the more excited applicants are about the position and its role in your company, the more excited you’ll be about them.

Interested in seeing an example? Check out the Zapier jobs page. What other good examples of job posts have you seen?