Voracious

I came across a job description (referred to as JD in rest of the post) on the internet and could not understand the role clearly. I was curious. Almost felt like it was copied from someone's JD without modifying much. So, I went ahead and googled a line from that JD. My guess was confirmed. I came across a lot of such confusing Job Descriptions online and really felt that they can be better. Hence, I thought of sharing my thoughts for all the hiring managers/recruiters out there on this topic.

Why copypasta JD is bad?

1. You are misleading the candidate

When you copy paste a stock JD or JD posted by some other company, you are miscommunicating about skills required for this role. Source JD might require candidates to know Python but the role that you want requires experience with Java. However, you forgot to change that. Either the candidate gets to know about actual requirement during one of the interview rounds or finds it out directly when they get hired and start working.

2. Adds additional cost to entire role closure

Because the JD contains information which is not accurately mapped to the actual role expectations, candidates/you will discover a mutual misfit later. By misfit, I mean at least one of the requirements is a road-block for either you or the candidate to close the position. For eg., you forgot to mention that the candidate might have to work in a different timezone than their base location and candidate is not happy with that. Candidate discovers this in 1st or subsequent rounds. The later candidate discovers this fact, more is the cost of acquisition. Time is money.

3. You lost an opportunity to grab a candidate's attention and make them feel excited about this role

Most of the JDs are boring and are copy-pasted. Many candidates just randomly apply to each job listing they come across until they land at least one offer. To candidates, all the job listings are the same, unless they are from GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) or NATU (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber). Don't you think your company is better than other thousand's of companies with the same role opening? Well, at least you pretend that you are better than others because you wanna close this role fast and sell yourself hard to get great candidates. :) You are losing on that opportunity to outshine on the JD and grab the candidate's attention. Consider this: after reading JD, the candidate is eager to hear back from you when they apply for the role. Wouldn't that be incredible?

PS

• This is constructive feedback to all the hiring managers out there. Please put some time and thought while drafting a clean and easy to understand JD.
• Try not to refer to other JD since that would bias your actual requirements. You would be tempted to include some lines in your JD because they look nice in JD of some other company.
• If you have no clue what would be JD for a role, it is likely that you are not fit for writing it in the first place. Get someone with more knowledge on that role to write that for you.
• Try to map expectations in terms of that role's deliverables rather than abstract wordplay.
• Often I have seen that JD expects almost everything from one person, like a Unicorn, cliché. That's not a fair ask. It would be a good idea to specify what are absolutely required skills and skills that can be taught post joining the new job.