How to Craft Compelling Job Descriptions: Tips for Recruiters

According to Gallup, voluntary attrition costs businesses up to twice an employee’s first year’s salary.

The wrong job description will attract the wrong candidate. That could lead to you hiring the wrong person and having to restart the process again. This is an expensive mistake.

A job description is more than just a post, it is an advertisement for the ideal person to help you achieve your business goals.

If you’ve written one that isn’t well put together or overwhelming to read, how many worthy candidates are going to respond?

In this article, we’ll get into:

• The must-haves of a great job description
• What you must understand before you start writing a job description
• How to tailor your job post for every role
• How to SEO optimize your job description

Let’s get started.

Must-have Elements of a Job Description

A job description outlines the responsibilities and qualifications required for an open role. Ideally, you’d list:

Job Responsibilities

What kind of work will they be taking over?

Write a detailed account of the main responsibilities that go into a job. Anything that influences work timings and workload is relevant here and must go into your list of job responsibilities.

For instance, if you are hiring a restaurant worker, and they have to come into work early to open the establishment and prep for the first batch of customers, this is a key responsibility that has to go into your job post.

Let’s look at another example, a list of job responsibilities for a social media manager:

Key Tasks:

• Conduct market research and analyze competitor strategies.
• Define clear goals and objectives for the social media campaign.
• Identify the most relevant social media platforms for the target audience.
• Develop a content calendar for the product launch.
• Create engaging, informative, and visually appealing content.
• Collaborate with the design team to ensure on-brand visual assets.
• Plan and execute social media advertising campaigns.
• Engage with followers and monitor social media conversations.
• Define and track relevant KPIs to measure campaign success.
• Regularly review and optimize the social media strategy based on data-driven insights.

Educational Qualifications

Steadily, skills are gaining precedence over education, but there are many roles for which this criterion is still vital.

Specify the degree you want to see and other qualifications that would certify any prerequisite knowledge that is relevant to the job.

If applicable, mention any preferred or highly desirable educational qualifications that would set a candidate apart. Clarify if equivalent work experience can substitute for formal education.

Required Skillsets

Make a concise list of the skills required for a job, but be reasonable with your demands. Many companies are overlooking this and getting called out for it.

If you’re looking to hire a performance marketer, listing graphic design as a skill so that they create the ads that go out is too idealistic. You’ll miss out if the skills you list are so diverse that no one person can own them.

Preferred Work Experience

This details the number of years of experience they have, the kind of employers you’d prefer for them to have worked with, and the kind of work they were involved in.

Work Environment

Is it fast-paced? What is the company’s take on work-life balance? You need to write an honest take on the work environment, so you don’t hire the wrong personality for the role.

If the role needs the candidate to be a self-starter to be a successful employee, advertising it as a role that comes with lots of mentorship will reel in the wrong candidate.

Required Assessments

Will they have to demonstrate their skills before you hire?

For example, if you’re hiring a writer, they might have to complete a paid trial so you can gauge their competency. An engineer might have to fix a piece of code or build a small project to showcase their skills.

Compensation and Benefits

Go into detail with this element of a job description. Regardless of how enthusiastic a candidate is about their work, this is the primary reason to work in the first place. Do you offer health insurance? Does your company place importance on mental well-being? These are all deciding factors when applying for a job.Go into detail with this element of a job description. Regardless of how enthusiastic a candidate is about their work, this is the primary reason to work in the first place. Do you offer health insurance? Does your company place importance on mental well-being? These are all deciding factors when applying for a job.

Your Company Values

This is becoming increasingly important, with a new generation of employees coming into the workforce. This is why it’s also important to build a brand besides your usual recruiting activities.

Start-ups have very different values from bigger, established companies, and this influences all the other aspects of a job, employee behavior, and the overall success of a role. Emphasize what you stand for.

Tip: Outline your ethical standards and diversity efforts to bring in more talent.

4 Major Things To Understand Before Starting the Job Description

You need to get into the right mindset before you attempt to do anything, and the same applies to writing a job description. Let’s explore 4 major things you need to understand before you put pen to paper and write that job description.

Your Job Description Is a Pitch

Employers often look at hiring for open roles with a very skewed mindset — that a job that is looking for an employee is a blessing for them, that an offer of employment is a favor. That is not the case.

Even if the economy is bad, and jobs are few and far between, your employee is doing just as much for you as you are for them. You need to adopt this idea before you get started:

You are pitching this job to the right employee.

The better your pitch is, the higher the number of quality applications you will receive, and the more likely it becomes that you end up with exactly the right person for the job.

Your Job Description Is a Pitch

Avoid being curt and negative in your job descriptions. We see a lot of job posts that make unreasonable demands from employees in terms of skill set and the number of hours they are expected to work.

You may identify as a brand that does not mince words, one that is fast-paced and thick-skinned, but your job post cannot speak to candidates in a demeaning way.

This reflects poorly on your work culture, and in 2024, could land you in some hot oil that is much worse than not finding the right candidate.

Differentiate Between Necessary and Nice-To-Have

Divide your list of skills into two buckets, necessary skills and nice-to-have skills. An effective way to do this is to ask yourself the question:

What do my employees need to know before starting work here, and what can I train them to do?

What they need to know is necessary. What you can train them to do is a nice-to-have, something that they can learn after they start work with your company.

For example, an engineering team lead must necessarily have coding skills, but the soft skills they need to communicate can be taught to them over time.

Focus on Outcomes and Impact

While tasks and compensation must be clearly outlined in your job description post, the impact of their role must be detailed too. What career paths are open to them as a result of working for you? What training do you offer? And most importantly:

How does their work impact the bigger picture?

Doing this will instill a sense of purpose in your employees.

SEO Optimization for Job Descriptions

On a slightly different take on things, let’s explore how to use ChatGPT to create SEO-optimized job descriptions.

Give ChatGPT the Necessary Details

List the following criteria:

• Job title
• Responsibilities
• Qualification
• Years of experience
• Desired skills
• Industry

Let’s try this with a social media manager role. Here’s our prompt.

Here’s what ChatGPT gave us:

Though this doesn’t sound terrible, it doesn’t have any differentiators in it. Let’s continue.

Tailor the Language and Optimize It for SEO

Generative AI will give you a generic job post, which you’ll need to lend your brand voice to.

Here’s our prompt to get a job post written in a specific brand voice and SEO-optimized.

Here’s how ChatGPT responded:

Tip: Ask ChatGPT to keep it concise and give you several drafts when entering your prompt. You might want to do your SEO research for the perfect keywords for your job description and enter those into your prompt.

How To Customize for Different Job Roles

Before you go on to write a job post, you need to speak the language of the people applying for these roles. Follow these pointers to successfully write a job post for any role:

• Understand the candidate persona: research their background, skills, and motivators.
• Identify the key competencies required for the role, and be sure to mention those without fail.
• Tailor the job title and summary using industry-specific terminology.
• Adapt the tone and style to match the target audience's expectations and preferences.
• Share examples of projects or challenges the candidate might encounter in the role.

Tip: Think of who your ideal candidate is. Are they precise and disciplined, or carefree? Embed this in your tone. Strike a balance between who they are and what your brand stands for.

How To Use RecruitingCRM & Talentroom To Create Jobs

We’ll take you through the steps to creating jobs on our platform.

Create the Company and Contact in RecruitingCRM

• Log in at recruitingcrm.com.
• Click "Companies" > "Add Company".
• Enter company details (name, industry, location, etc.).
• Click "Add Contact" and provide the contact person's details.

Create the Job Description

• Go to the "Jobs" section in RecruitingCRM.
• Click "Add Job" to create a new description.
• Fill in the job title, responsibilities, qualifications, and relevant details.

Publish the Job to Talentroom Marketplace

• After completing the job description, click the option to publish it on the Talentroom Marketplace.
• This will make the job visible to other recruiters and agencies for collaboration.

Keeping a Job Private

• If you prefer to keep a job internal and not share it on the marketplace, simply choose not to publish it on Talentroom.
• You can always close the offer and keep the job within your own RecruitingCRM account.

Publishing a Job Directly

• If you're in a hurry, you can publish a job directly on Talentroom by including your own public name, description, and the split percentage for collaboration.
• This allows you to quickly share the job with other recruiters without going through the complete job creation process in RecruitingCRM.

Accessing the Public Jobs Marketplace

• The public jobs marketplace on Talentroom can be accessed through a dedicated menu entry under the "Jobs" section.
• While logged in, you will see both your own published jobs and jobs from other recruiters and agencies.
• The marketplace provides powerful search and filtering options, similar to the existing talent and private job search features, making it easy to find relevant job listings.

Create the perfect job post with RecruitingCRM

You’ve got the guidelines for writing the perfect job description, steps to automate the process with ChatGPT, and instructions on how to publish a job post with RecruitingCRM.

If you follow this advice, you’ll know how to write the post that will get you candidates who flourish at work and have low employee turnover in general.

RecruitingCRM will give you an advantage when it comes to recruiting operations, not just with crafting descriptions, but with the whole hiring process.