How Job Descriptions Quietly Thin the Pipeline

Who decided this role needs seven years of experience? If you ask that about most job descriptions, the honest answer is nobody in particular. The requirement got there the way most requirements do, a little at a time, and nobody ever took it out.

It usually goes something like this. A role gets posted during a year of fast growth. The hiring manager asks for a degree because the last three people in the job had one. Someone adds "7+ years" because that's what the team is used to seeing, and someone else adds a certification that's loosely related. The search closes, the hire works out, and next time the requirements get copied into the new posting without anyone looking at them. Three years later the company is in a different market, at a different stage, and the job itself has changed. The description hasn't. It's still filtering hard, but for a target that no longer exists.

Job descriptions pile up requirements the way code piles up technical debt: gradually, mostly during busy periods, when nobody is asking what's necessary as opposed to what's familiar.

This would matter less if candidates ignored the lists, but a lot of them take the lists literally. LinkedIn has reported that many people hold back from applying unless they meet all of the listed requirements, and that women do this more than men. So a list someone wrote during a busy quarter is making hiring decisions every day, before a recruiter opens the queue.

What makes this hard to notice is that the people it turns away never appear anywhere. They aren't rejected in screening, so there's no record of them. Career changers, people returning to work, and people who came up by an unusual route are the ones most likely to read a long list of requirements and decide not to bother. You can't see the candidates who didn't show up.

Why it gets worse at scale

When you're hiring for one or two roles a quarter, a thin pipeline is manageable. You source a bit harder and the problem stays invisible. With twenty open requisitions across several departments, it's a different situation. Each over-specified posting cuts inbound applications by some amount, and across all your open headcount that adds up to a shortage your recruiters didn't cause. Nothing in the ATS or the sourcing tools or the screening is broken, and still everyone downstream is managing scarcity instead of choosing between good candidates.

The usual response is to spend more on sourcing: more credits, more job board spend, more agency retainers. That treats the symptom. The cause is a document that could be rewritten in an afternoon. Instead of listing credentials that stand in for the work, describe the work. What does success look like in this role after six months? What problem is this person actually there to solve? If you write to that, you stop filtering for people who resemble the last hire, and you start attracting people who can do the job, including some who learned to do it a different way.

The objection, and why I think it's out of date

There's a fair objection to all this. If you loosen the requirements, you get more applications, and more of them won't fit. Suppose a team used to get 80 focused applications for a role and now gets 180 mixed ones. Somebody has to sort through them. Faced with that, most teams decide that a thin pipeline of people who look right on paper beats a big one that takes real work to sort.

That was a sensible trade when every screen needed a recruiter, because a recruiter can only make so many screening calls in a day. I don't think it holds anymore, and it's a big part of why we built Asendia. Software doesn't run out of calls. It phones each applicant soon after they apply, weekday evenings and Sundays included, and has a structured spoken conversation with them about their actual skills, their relevant experience, and how they'd think about the role, following up on what they say the way a recruiter would. The results go into the ATS with a qualification summary and the candidate's own words attached, so a recruiter starts from a vetted shortlist rather than a raw inbox.

Once the first conversation no longer depends on a recruiter's calendar, a bigger and more varied pool stops being a burden. Every applicant gets talked to, nobody gets lost in a manual queue, and the person who came by an unusual route gets the same hearing as everyone else. (If you're curious what judging actual ability looks like at that scale, there's a longer piece on AI candidate screening for skills-based hiring.)

A lot of companies have spent money on sourcing tools, ATS upgrades and structured interviews without ever looking hard at the document that decides who applies in the first place. Loosening the requirements is a bet that what someone can do matters more than how they got there. That bet only pays off if the screening that follows can tell the difference. When it can, you can afford to write a job description that describes the job.

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