Most job descriptions read like an internal HR note that escaped onto the public internet. Long lists of responsibilities copy-pasted from the previous version of the role. A “requirements” section that excludes the exact person the team wants to hire. A salary line that says “competitive” and means “we haven’t decided yet.”
Qualified applicants read three or four ads side by side. The one they apply to is the one that answered their questions before they had to ask. The structure below is what we see working across the jobs Join’s customers post in DACH, France, and Spain. None of it is complicated. All of it gets skipped.
The four-line opener
The top of the ad is the only part most candidates read in full. It is also the part most boards (Indeed, LinkedIn, XING, Stepstone) use to build the preview snippet a candidate sees before they click. Four lines, four questions:
- What does this team do, in plain words? Not the mission statement. What does the team actually ship.
- What is the role’s job? One sentence. The thing the person will be measured on.
- Who are they working with? A founder, a head of engineering, a five-person product team. Specifics.
- Why does this role exist now? Growth, replacement, a new product, a new market. Real context, not “exciting opportunity”.
If those four lines are right, the rest of the ad becomes confirmation. If they are wrong, the rest does not matter, because the candidate already moved on.
”Required” mostly lies
The “required qualifications” section is where most ads accidentally exclude the people the team would actually hire. The pattern is familiar: someone wrote the list five years ago, every revision adds a bullet, no revision removes one, and the result is a 12-item list that describes a candidate who does not exist.
The fix is uncomfortable. Cut the list to the things that are genuinely deal-breakers, and move everything else into “nice to have”. For most SMB roles, the deal-breaker list is two or three items long. If yours is longer than that, it is not a requirements list. It is a preferences list with confidence.
The cost of being honest here is real. Candidates who do not see themselves in every bullet self-select out of applying, and they do so at higher rates if they are already underrepresented in the role. The HP-internal study popularised by Tara Mohr in Harvard Business Review found women applied only when they met 100% of listed criteria; men applied at around 60%. Mohr’s interpretation of why is the interesting half: the gap is less about candidate confidence and more about how candidates read “required”. They read it literally. In Join’s customer pipelines the symptom is the same: longer requirement lists predict narrower and more homogeneous applicant pools, in that order. Long lists narrow your pipeline twice: once on the absolute filter, once on who reads them and clicks away.
Salary is the test
Either put a real range in the ad or leave the line out entirely. The middle ground (“competitive compensation” or “salary commensurate with experience”) is worse than silence. It signals that the company has not decided, or has decided but will not say, and both signals tell a strong candidate the same thing: this process is going to be frustrating.
If you can put a range, put it. Even a wide one (“€55–75k depending on experience, plus equity”) is more useful than a vague phrase. LinkedIn’s own talent research puts 91% of respondents saying a disclosed range affects whether they apply, consistent across industries and seniority. Internal candidates already know what you pay; competitors can model it; the only people in the dark are the applicants you are trying to attract.
There is also a regulatory clock. The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) requires EU employers to disclose the starting pay or pay range for a role in the job ad itself, and bans asking candidates about salary history. Member states must transpose it into national law by 7 June 2026. Candidates applying to ads in 2027 will read 2026 ads as practice for the new norm.
The “what you’ll actually do” test
Most “responsibilities” sections are abstract: “drive results”, “own outcomes”, “partner with stakeholders”. None of those phrases mean anything to a candidate trying to picture a Tuesday in the role.
The fix: rewrite each bullet so it describes a concrete thing the person will do in the first 60 days. Not “drive marketing strategy” but “ship the first paid-search experiment”. Not “partner with engineering” but “lead the weekly cross-functional planning for the platform team”. Concrete verbs, real outputs.
The benefit is double. The candidate can picture the job, and the hiring manager is forced to know what success looks like before writing it down. If you cannot write the 60-day bullets, you are not ready to hire. The same list also has a second life: those bullets are the spine of the interview scorecard. What you would measure success on in the first 60 days is what you should be screening for in interviews.
The closer
The bottom of the ad tells the candidate what happens next. Three lines is enough:
- How they apply (form, email, link: pick one and stick to it)
- What the process looks like (three stages, four stages: say which)
- When they will hear back (a realistic window, not “we’ll be in touch”)
A candidate who knows the process is far more likely to follow it through. A candidate who does not is the candidate who ghosts mid-pipeline.
The 60-second test
Hand the draft to someone who has nothing to do with the role. A peer, a friend, an accountant. Time them reading it. After 60 seconds, take it away and ask three questions:
- What does this team do?
- What is the role’s job?
- What would they earn?
If they can answer all three from one minute of reading, the ad works. If they cannot, the candidates who will see the ad next to four others in a job-board feed cannot either.
The structure is not complicated. Putting it down on the page in front of a hiring manager who has been doing this job for seven years and “knows what good looks like”: that is the harder part. The rest is editing.
