Writing a Job Advert That Attracts the Right People
Most job adverts are not written to attract anyone. They are an internal requirements document, lightly edited and published. They list twelve essential skills, describe the company in superlatives, omit the salary, and end with a paragraph about being a rockstar.
Then the role stays open for four months.
A job advert is a piece of marketing aimed at people who are good at their job and therefore have options. Here is what changes the response.
Publish the salary range
This is the highest-impact change available, and the most resisted.
Adverts with a salary range get meaningfully more applications, and better-matched ones. Candidates filter themselves out early instead of at offer stage, which saves everyone weeks. In a growing number of jurisdictions it is becoming a legal requirement anyway.
The two common objections have answers. "Our existing staff will see it." They will see it when it is published by the law, or by a candidate, or by a salary survey — and if your range embarrasses you relative to your current team, that is a real problem that secrecy is postponing, not solving. "We want flexibility." Publish a range and say what moves someone through it.
Separate what is required from what is nice
Long "essential" lists are actively counterproductive because they filter asymmetrically. Candidates who meet most criteria but not all often do not apply — and research consistently shows this effect is stronger among women and underrepresented candidates. You are not filtering for the best people; you are filtering for the most confident.
Keep essential to the three or four things somebody genuinely cannot start without. Put everything else under a clearly-labelled nice to have, and mean it.
Where you can, describe the capability rather than the credential. "Comfortable owning a production service end to end" is more useful than "5+ years Kubernetes", and it lets in people who got there by another route.
Describe the actual work
Candidates are trying to picture their Tuesday. Help them:
Vague: You will work with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality solutions.
Concrete: You'll own our billing service. In the first quarter that means migrating it off the legacy scheduler — working with one other backend engineer and our finance lead.
The second tells a strong candidate whether they want it. The first is noise.
Being specific also filters. Someone who does not want to touch legacy migration will pass, which is exactly what you want at this stage rather than in week three.
Be honest about the difficult parts
Every role has them. Naming one or two builds more trust than any amount of culture language:
"Fair warning: our test suite takes 40 minutes and we know it. Improving it is part of this role."
Candidates who read that and stay are the ones you want. It also makes everything else you say more credible, because you have demonstrated you are not only selling.
Say how the process works
Tell people what they are signing up for: how many stages, what each involves, roughly how long, and who they will meet. Candidates are managing several processes at once and will prioritise the legible one. Then hold to it — a process that runs as advertised is itself a signal about how the company operates.
Cut the boilerplate
Remove: "fast-paced environment", "wear many hats", "work hard play hard", "like a family", "rockstar", "ninja", "guru". These carry no information and several carry warnings. If a sentence would be equally true of any company, delete it.
Replace the generic culture paragraph with one specific, verifiable thing. "We write design docs for anything taking more than a week, and review them asynchronously" tells a candidate more than three paragraphs about values.
A structure that works
- The role in two sentences — what you need and why it exists now
- Salary range, location and working arrangement — near the top, not buried
- What you will actually do — concrete, ideally first-quarter specific
- What we need — three or four genuine essentials
- Nice to have — clearly optional
- Context — team size, who you report to, how work is decided
- The honest bit — what is hard about this job
- The process — stages and timeline
Shorter than what you have now, more specific, and considerably more effective.