A job description has one job: attract the people who can do the work and deter the people who cannot. Most manage neither, because they were written by consensus and optimised to be uncontroversial.
Cut the requirements list roughly in half
The average posting lists twelve to eighteen requirements. Almost none are genuine thresholds. The practical effect is asymmetric: strong candidates who miss two items self-select out, while candidates who read requirements as aspirational apply anyway. You have filtered for confidence, not capability.
Separate what you actually need from what you would like, keep the first list under six items, and mean them.
Describe the first six months, not the person
Compare:
“The ideal candidate is a self-starter with excellent communication skills and a passion for data.”
with:
“In your first six months you will take over a reporting pipeline that currently breaks about once a fortnight, and make it something the finance team can rely on without asking us.”
The second tells a competent person whether they want this. It also tells them what to talk about in the interview, which raises the quality of the conversation before it happens.
Publish the range
Roles with a posted range get more applications and materially fewer wasted final stages. Several jurisdictions now require it regardless. The usual objection — that internal staff will see it — is a real problem, but it is a compensation-structure problem, and it exists whether or not you post.
Name the constraints honestly
On-call rotation, three days in office, a legacy codebase, a hiring manager who is new. Every one of these deters some candidates. They also deter exactly the candidates who would have left in month four, and the ones who stay arrive without a grievance.
The paragraph to delete
Boilerplate about being a fast-paced dynamic team that works hard and plays hard. It says nothing, it appears verbatim in thousands of postings, and it costs you the top of your funnel where attention is scarcest.
How to know it worked
Do not measure application volume. Measure the share of applications your recruiter would advance to a first conversation. A description that halves volume and doubles that share is a considerable improvement, and it will look like a failure on any dashboard tracking applicant counts.
