Nobody is Reading your Job Description

For most candidates, the job description is not where the hiring process starts; it’s where trust starts.

Long before an interview, before a recruiter email, before the Glassdoor deep-dive, there’s that moment when someone opens a JD and asks: Is this a place that knows itself?

Research by LinkedIn suggests 84% of candidates actively look for culture cues in the hiring process, not just compensation or title. The JD is one of the first such cues. The words you choose, the level of detail you bother to offer, the honesty (or lack of it) about the work all quietly announce who you are.

Which is why it’s so jarring that the average JD reads less like an introduction and more like a legal stub: generic, overstuffed, and emotionally empty. The tone says, “We had to write something.”

When the JD explains the obvious (and nothing else)

A strange pattern has emerged over the last decade: the more specialised the role, the more tempted companies are to over-explain it.

Social media marketing roles that painstakingly define “owning the social media calendar.” Product roles that describe “shipping features that delight users.” HR roles that explain what HR is. It’s the equivalent of explaining what a dentist does in a job ad for a dentist.

All that exposition crowds out the only things the JD should really be doing: describing this version of the job, in this team, at this moment in the company’s life. Instead, we get generic paragraphs that would be equally at home on a competitor’s careers page and in a textbook.

The status quo inside most organisations isn’t one tidy document per role, either. It’s multiple half-remembered versions: one in HR’s ATS, one in a manager’s Google Drive, one floating around in someone’s email from a hiring round three years ago. 

Over time, phrases are added to sound “grown up”: “self-starter,” “fast-paced,” “strategic,” “hands-on,” “rock-solid communication skills.”

Somewhere along the way, organisations began relying on a small, overworked vocabulary to advertise team culture. And almost every JD now describes every team as “fast-paced,” “lean,” “agile,” “cross-functional,” “high-energy,” “impact-driven,” “flat,” “collaborative,” and “comfortable with ambiguity,” all attributes that define pretty much every organization that functions today.

None of these edits make the role clearer. They just make the JD longer and, often, less honest.

AI, ATS, and the problem of garbage in, garbage out

Now add two more ingredients to this muddled base: AI writing tools and keyword-driven Applicant Tracking Systems.

AI is increasingly used to “clean up” or even generate JDs. ATS tools then parse those same descriptions and rank candidates based on how closely their CV language matches the JD language. AI resume screeners explicitly extract skills and requirements from job descriptions to build their taxonomies. When the JD is vague, inflated or off-target, that fuzziness becomes machine-readable.

At the same time, multiple candidate-experience studies show that nearly half to 60% of job seekers abandon applications they experience as too vague, long or complicated. The combination is brutal: bad JDs repel humans while still being faithfully ingested by systems that now treat every fuzzy phrase as a filter.

The result is a form of selection-by-template. People who would be good at the work, but don’t mirror your exact wording, simply never surface. You end up with candidates who are forced to game the system instead of being honest about their skills and aspirations.

Let the interviews change the document, not just the other way around

Even when the JD isn’t terrible, it has another problem: reality.

The person you hire walks into a living system, not a static diagram. Unsurprisingly, the role they end up doing three months in is often different (sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically) from the neat bullet points they read at the beginning.

Candidates are feeling this gap. A recent survey of workers in the US found that 79% felt “career catfished” — misled about key aspects of a job, from responsibilities to culture to compensation. That’s not just recruiting gone wrong; it’s a drift between the promise of the JD and the reality of the work.

You can call that “evolving needs” if you like. From the candidate’s point of view, it feels more like bait-and-switch.

The more honest framing is: roles move. They always have. The mistake is pretending the JD is a fixed, sacred artefact, instead of treating it as something that should be refined as you learn more about the work, the market and the people you’re speaking to.

There’s a quiet opportunity most companies ignore: using interviews not just to test candidates against the JD, but to test the JD against reality.

If you pay attention, interviews are rich feedback loops. You notice what people light up about. You notice what they misunderstand. You notice patterns in what strong candidates bring that you hadn’t thought to ask for — a deeper analytical bias here, a systems mindset there, a knack for internal storytelling that no template ever named.

In a healthier system, the JD would adapt as these insights accumulate. The first version might be a hypothesis about the role. By the time an offer goes out, the document would have been tightened, clarified, maybe even re-aimed based on what you actually saw in the market.

Instead, most teams treat the JD as locked the moment it hits LinkedIn. The smartest organisations quietly do the opposite: they let discovery in the hiring process reshape the description, so that the next person who reads it gets something closer to the truth.

In an ideal world, the job description as we know it would disappear

If you follow this line far enough, you end up somewhere slightly radical: the traditional JD, with its ritual structure and ritual bloat, doesn’t really deserve to survive.

What both sides actually need is a different artefact altogether — a clean, living agreement about the work.

Call it whatever you like, but it would focus less on listing duties and more on aligning expectations:

• Here’s the problem this role exists to solve.
  
  
• Here’s what “good” looks like at 3, 6, 12 months.
  
  
• Here’s what you won’t be responsible for.
  
  
• Here’s how decisions get made and who you’ll work with.
  
  
• Here’s what is unlikely to change, and what might.
  
  

In other words: not a lecture on what “a product marketer” is, but a map of what this product marketer will actually be trusted to own.

Given that 97% of CHROs say they plan to change some aspect of their organisation’s culture in 2025, it’s strange that the core document introducing people to that culture is still treated as a static template.

If you can’t burn the JD down (yet), here’s a better way to write one

Most teams can’t throw away the JD tomorrow. Compliance, process, ATS workflows — there are reasons the format hangs around. But even inside those constraints, there’s room to do this better.

A simple set of do’s and don’ts goes a surprisingly long way:

1. Do start with outcomes; don’t start with a textbook.
Instead of “will manage the content calendar,” say: “By month six, you’ll have launched X campaigns, shipped Y longform pieces and built a repeatable process for A and B.” Make the JD forward-looking and outcome-shaped.

2. Do write for someone who already knows the craft; don’t explain their profession back to them.
A brand marketer doesn’t need you to define brand marketing. A designer doesn’t need a lecture on Figma. Assume competence. Use the space to talk about the context they’re walking into.

3. Do admit what the role isn’t; don’t leave the edges fuzzy.
If this role is not a people manager, say so. If it’s not a strategy role, say so. If it won’t come with a big team “later”, don’t imply that it will. Boundaries are part of the offer.

4. Do keep the requirements list honest; don’t treat it as a wish-list dumping ground.
Every extra “must have” you add may knock out someone who could excel. Focus on the three to five capabilities that are genuinely non-negotiable today, not everything you might someday like.

5. Do optimise for clarity first, ATS second; don’t reverse that order.
Yes, include relevant keywords so your systems can do their job. But if a human reading your JD can’t tell what the job is, you’ve built a filter for machines, not people.

6. Do revisit the JD after the hire; don’t leave it frozen as a historical artefact.
Once someone has been in the seat for a few months, ask them to mark up the original JD: what turned out to be fluff, what was missing, what they actually do. Fold that back into the document. It’s a living description, not a plaque.

The JD will probably be with us for a while, if only because systems and habits are slow to change. But the way we write them doesn’t have to be stuck in 2010.

If this is the first glimpse someone gets of your culture, your expectations and your honesty, it’s worth asking: what does this description really describe — the job, or our inability to say what we mean?

Note from the author:
I don’t claim to be an HR expert. I’m simply someone who’s been a job seeker across multiple organisations, reading JDs that promised the world and roles that delivered something else entirely. These observations come from lived experience and from the belief that the hiring industry deserves more honesty, more clarity, and far better first impressions than the ones we’re all still pretending are good enough.

‍