Job Descriptions Are Written for the Person Who Already Has the Job

If you read a typical job description closely, you'll notice who it's describing. It's someone who has already done exactly this work, with these tools and this title, at another company. In other words, it describes the person who already has the job.

That made more sense once. The format was settled at a time when roles were fairly stable, companies hired to fill a function that already existed, and the best evidence someone would fit was that they'd done the identical job elsewhere. If the job barely changed, asking for someone who'd done it before was a reasonable shortcut.

Jobs change faster now. The tools change, the scope grows, the team around the role gets reorganized. But the description often gets written by someone who last looked at the role two hiring cycles ago, and it carries requirements inherited from whoever held the seat before. Some of them were relevant in 2019 and nobody has looked at them since.

You can see the results in almost any batch of postings. One asks for five or more years of experience with a tool that has only existed for three. Another requires a four-year degree for work where the degree has nothing to do with performance. Another lists 22 "required" qualifications, when the last four people who did well in the role might, if anyone checked, have shared about six of them.

Who this filters out

When pipelines are weak, most hiring teams look at sourcing volume or screening quality. But the job description comes before both. It decides who applies at all.

There's an often-quoted finding that men tend to apply when they meet about 60% of the listed qualifications, while women tend to apply only when they meet close to all of them. It's usually discussed as a diversity problem, and it is one. I think it also points at something more general. An inflated list of requirements does the best job of filtering out exactly the people who take requirements seriously.

So think about who is left. The applicants to an overstuffed description tend to fall into two groups: people who really are a strong match, and people who apply to everything regardless of fit. The group in between, people who might be excellent but aren't sure about one or two peripheral items, quietly decides not to bother. You never see them. The pipeline looks thin, and the team concludes that talent is scarce, when the filter at the entrance was set for the wrong thing.

What I'd do is cut the description down to what someone actually needs to know or be able to do to succeed in the first six months. Everything else is a wish list, and it's better either labeled as one or left out. You get a wider pool, and I'd expect better candidates at the top of it too, because people applying to a realistic description are responding to the real work rather than to the wording of a posting.

The objection

The obvious worry is volume. Open up the requirements and you'll be flooded with people who can't do the job. That's a fair concern when screening is manual. A recruiter facing 400 applications can only look at each one so closely.

But notice what the worry implies. It means the narrow job description has been doing the screening. When the first filter is a keyword match on a resume, the description has to be precise, because a tight requirements list is the only thing controlling who gets through. If the first screen is an actual conversation, you can afford a broader description and let the conversation work out who is qualified.

That's the part of Asendia I think gets overlooked. When someone applies, it calls them and talks through what the role really requires, such as relevant experience, how they'd handle specific scenarios, availability, and expectations. The follow-up questions adapt to each person, but everyone gets the same core questions, so what lands on the recruiter's desk is a set of written summaries that can actually be compared with each other, rather than a pile of resumes sorted by keyword. The shortlist reflects what people showed in conversation, not how well they matched the wording of a posting. If you're wondering how to tell whether a change like this is working, the post on what to track instead of time-to-hire covers the numbers I'd look at.

Job descriptions don't get much attention because they feel like paperwork you finish before recruiting starts. But the description is the first decision in the pipeline, and every applicant pool after it depends on it. One built around an ideal incumbent doesn't set a high bar so much as narrow the pool to people who know how to describe themselves in the right words.

A cheap experiment: take the description you post most often, and next to each requirement, note whether your last few good hires actually had it on their first day. Whatever they didn't have probably doesn't belong in the required list.

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