Writing Job Postings That Actually Work: A Hiring Manager's Guide to Clear Communication

This is the second in a four-part series on analyzing job postings from different perspectives: as a candidate, as a hiring manager, as an HR partner, and as a competitive analyst.

I learned to write job postings the hard way. I wrote them without a ton of care and got zero candidates, or a million, or had it rejected by someone wiser than me for breaking a rule I’d never heard of. After the turmoil of resume spam and awkward interviews, I realized the job posting wasn’t just a requirement checklist. It was the first conversation between me and my future team member, and I was failing that conversation badly.

The best job postings start with a simple question: If I were considering this role, what would I actually want to know? Not what HR guidelines suggested I should include, not what other companies were writing, but what real information would help someone make a good decision about joining our team.

Start With the Job, Not the Job Description Template

Most hiring managers begin with whatever template their company provides, then try to customize it for their specific role. This backwards approach produces generic postings that could describe any job at any company. Instead, start by clearly defining what this person will actually do in their first 90 days.

Here’s how I approach it now. Before writing a single word of the job posting, I document:

Week 1-2 expectations: What will they focus on while getting oriented? Month 1 deliverables: What concrete output do I expect by the end of their first month? Month 3 goals: What major project or responsibility should they own by quarter end?

For example, for a senior product manager, my 90-day plan might look like this:

Weeks 1-2: Meet with key stakeholders in engineering, design, sales, and customer success. Review existing product roadmap and understand current customer feedback themes. Shadow customer calls and review support tickets.

Month 1: Audit our feature request backlog and propose a prioritization framework. Lead your first sprint planning session. Complete competitive analysis of three main competitors’ recent feature releases.

Month 3: Own the full product planning process for our Q2 roadmap. Launch one customer-requested feature from conception to completion. Present quarterly business review findings to the executive team.

This exercise forced me to think concretely about what success looked like, which made writing the job posting straightforward. Instead of vague language about “driving product strategy,” I could describe specific deliverables and decision-making authority.

This, by the way, will also come in mighty handy when you actually hire someone and they start their new job.

The Anatomy of an Effective Requirements Section

The requirements section is where most job postings fall apart. The common failure mode is listing every possible skill that might be helpful, creating an intimidating laundry list that scares away good candidates while doing nothing to filter out unqualified ones.

Your goal here, remember, is to describe the role truthfully such that you attract candidates likely to succeed. Your goal should not be to impress candidates with all of the technologies you know, or to list every skill you can think of.

Instead of this kitchen sink approach:

Must have: 5+ years experience in product management, experience with Agile methodologies, strong analytical skills, excellent communication abilities, technical background preferred, startup experience, enterprise software experience, customer-facing experience, data-driven decision making, A/B testing experience, SQL knowledge, project management skills, leadership experience.

Try this focused approach:

Core requirements (non-negotiable):

• 3+ years product management experience with B2B software
• Track record of launching features that improved key business metrics
• Comfort working directly with engineering teams on technical tradeoffs

Important but teachable:

• Experience with SQL or similar data analysis tools
• Prior work in small teams (under 50 people)

Nice to have:

• Domain knowledge in our industry (financial services)
• Experience with our specific tech stack (Ruby/React)

This structure accomplishes three things: it clearly signals what’s truly necessary, acknowledges that good people can learn new skills, and gives candidates permission to apply even if they don’t check every box.

The key insight is that requirements exist to help both parties make good decisions. Overly broad requirements don’t filter effectively and may exclude exactly the people you want. Overly narrow requirements can eliminate candidates who would bring valuable perspectives you hadn’t considered.

Writing About Compensation: The Trust Test

How you handle compensation in job postings sends a strong signal about your company’s transparency and confidence in its offering. I’ve tried every approach over the years, and the most effective strategy is surprising in its simplicity: be as specific as possible.

This of course varies depending on the jurisdiction of the posting and pay transparency laws that might apply, but the core premise remains.

Weak approach:

“Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.”

This tells candidates nothing useful and suggests you’re either uninformed about market rates or trying to lowball them. It just begs questions you probably don’t have an answer to. Competitive with who? Are you really paying top decile?

Better approach:

“Total compensation package: $120K-$140K base salary (determined by experience and interview performance), equity package subject to vesting, plus comprehensive benefits.”

The detailed approach demonstrates several things: you understand your market, you’ve thought through your compensation philosophy, and you respect candidates enough to give them real information for their decision-making process.

There is good data out for pay ranges for most jobs you’re going to hire for, so understand where your offer falls within that. Whether it’s 75th percentile vs 40th you should know. Not all offers are top quartile, in fact only about 25% of them are. So if you are paying mid or lower market rates you should understand what that really means for the role, your hire, and requirements and adjust accordingly.

I’ve learned that being specific about compensation actually improves the quality of your candidate pool. People who are genuinely interested in the role and compensation structure will engage more thoughtfully. Those who are fishing for higher offers will self-select out early, saving everyone time.

Describing Your Team and Culture Authentically

The team and culture section is where most job postings become aspirational fiction. Companies describe the team they wish they were rather than the team they actually are. Candidates can sense this authenticity gap, and it creates skepticism about everything else in the posting.

Generic culture description:

“We’re a fast-paced, innovative team that values collaboration and results. We work hard and play hard in a supportive, inclusive environment where everyone’s voice matters.”

This could describe any company and provides no useful information about what it’s actually like to work there.

Specific culture description:

“Our 8-person product team operates with high autonomy and accountability. We have weekly one-on-ones, monthly team retrospectives, and quarterly planning sessions. Most people work 9am-6pm with flexibility around personal commitments. We make decisions through discussion and data, not hierarchy. Our VP of Product has an open-door policy and will talk through any product decision with you.”

This gives candidates concrete information about meeting cadences, decision-making processes, work-life expectations, and management accessibility. How your team operates and makes decisions is more useful to candidates than what brand of fizzy water you stock.

When describing culture, focus on observable behaviors rather than aspirational values. Instead of “we value innovation,” describe how innovation actually happens: “Engineers spend 20% of their time on self-directed projects, and we dedicate one sprint per quarter to technical debt and experimental features.”

The Strategic Context That Actually Helps

Many job postings include a company description that reads like marketing copy for investors rather than useful information for potential employees. Candidates want to understand the business context they’d be stepping into, but they need different information than your pitch deck provides.

Investor-focused company description:

“We’re revolutionizing the $500B financial services industry with our cutting-edge AI-powered platform. Our innovative solution is gaining rapid traction with 300% year-over-year growth and backing from top-tier venture capital firms.”

Employee-focused company description:

“We build software that helps small business owners manage their finances more effectively. Our customers are typically sole proprietors or companies with 2-10 employees who previously used spreadsheets or basic accounting software. We’re profitable with 40,000+ customers and growing about 20% annually. This role would help us expand from basic bookkeeping features into more sophisticated financial planning tools.”

The second approach gives candidates practical context about the customer base, competitive landscape, business fundamentals, and growth trajectory that would actually affect their day-to-day work experience.

Setting Realistic Expectations About Growth and Challenges

One of the biggest disconnects between job postings and reality is the sanitized version of company challenges. Every role has constraints, tradeoffs, and difficulties. Acknowledging these honestly actually attracts stronger candidates who prefer to solve real problems rather than coast in perfect conditions.

Sanitized version:

“Join our rapidly growing team and help us scale our platform to serve millions of users worldwide.”

Realistic version:

“We’re at an inflection point where our manual customer onboarding process is becoming a bottleneck as we grow. You’d be responsible for designing and implementing automated workflows while maintaining our high-touch customer experience standards. This involves balancing efficiency with personalization: a challenge we’re excited to tackle with the right person.”

The realistic version accomplishes several things: it shows you understand your actual challenges, it gives candidates a specific problem to evaluate their interest in solving, and it demonstrates that you won’t sugarcoat difficult aspects of the work.

Common Mistakes That Sabotage Good Job Postings

After reviewing hundreds of job postings from my teams over the years, certain mistakes appear repeatedly:

The “Unicorn Trap”: Requiring expert-level experience in too many areas. This usually indicates unclear role definition rather than genuine necessity.

The “Experience Inflation”: Requiring 5+ years of experience for tasks that someone could learn in 6 months. This often reflects manager uncertainty about how to evaluate skills rather than actual job complexity. An easy razor is to look at your best current employees and see how long they have been working with various technologies. Many will be much shorter than you’d think, good people learn quickly.

The “Buzzword Soup”: Using industry jargon without explaining what it means in your specific context. “Growth hacking,” “customer success,” and “business intelligence” mean different things at different companies.

The “Missing Manager”: Not explaining who they’d report to, how the team is structured, or what kind of management style to expect. People join companies but they leave managers.

The “Vague Impact”: Describing responsibilities without explaining how success would be measured or what business impact the role should drive.

A Framework for Job Posting Quality Control

Before publishing any job posting, run through this checklist:

1. Clarity Test: Could someone outside our company understand what this person would actually do day-to-day?

2. Honesty Test: Does this accurately represent the role’s challenges and growth opportunities?

3. Specificity Test: Are the requirements specific enough to help candidates self-assess accurately?

4. Respect Test: Does this provide enough information for someone to make an informed decision about applying?

5. Differentiation Test: Does this sound like our company specifically, or could it describe any similar role at any company?

The best job postings feel like conversations with someone you’d want to work with. They’re honest about challenges, clear about expectations, and respectful of candidates’ time and intelligence. When you nail this balance, you’ll find that your candidate quality improves dramatically, and your interview process becomes more focused and productive.