Writing Job Descriptions That Attract the Right Candidates (and Filter the Wrong Ones)

Outcomes, not duties#

To a candidate, "grow the KSA partner channel from 12 to 30 accounts in year one" says more than ten duty bullets. Outcomes let strong candidates picture the job and self-assess honestly.

Outcome-based ads also improve everything downstream: screening criteria fall directly out of the outcomes, interview questions become "tell me about a time you did something like this", and the eventual 90-day plan is already half-written. A duties list, by contrast, describes activity without defining success — which is why hires from duty-based ads so often disappoint against expectations no one wrote down.

The five-requirement discipline#

Every requirement past the genuine must-haves cuts your applicant pool — research consistently shows strong candidates, particularly women, skip ads where they miss any listed item. If it isn’t disqualifying, it isn’t a requirement.

The pruning test for each bullet: would you genuinely reject an otherwise excellent candidate who lacks this? If not, move it to a clearly labelled "useful but not required" line or delete it. Most fifteen-item lists survive this test with four or five items — the rest were preferences, personality wishes and legacy text from the last time the ad ran.

• Keep: verifiable, genuinely disqualifying requirements (max five).
• Separate: nice-to-haves, explicitly labelled as such.
• Delete: personality adjectives, years-of-experience proxies for skills you can test directly.

Publish the salary band#

Ads with salary ranges attract measurably more qualified applicants and waste less time on mismatched expectations. In the GCC, where packages vary widely, this is the single cheapest improvement available.

The standard objections dissolve on inspection. Internal-equity worries assume current staff don’t know the market — they do. Negotiation-position worries trade a phantom advantage for a real cost: candidates who would have accepted your range but never applied. If the band is genuinely embarrassing against the market, the ad was never the problem.

The honest sell#

One paragraph on why this role, this company, now — written like a person, not a brochure. Candidates discount superlatives; they respond to specifics.

Specifics that work: what the team is building, what the hire will own in the first quarter, one true detail about how the company operates ("we run two-week cycles; you’ll demo to the founders every other Friday"). Read the final draft aloud — anything you would be embarrassed to say to a candidate’s face ("rockstar", "work hard play hard", "fast-paced environment") should not survive the edit.

Key takeaways

• Lead with outcomes the hire will own.
• Cap requirements at five genuine must-haves.
• Publish the salary band.
• Sell with specifics, not superlatives.

Frequently asked questions#

Sources and further reading#

1. LinkedIn Economic Graph