Your job description is losing you candidates before you meet them
The strongest engineers read requirement lists as a signal about how a company thinks. Most lists signal something you did not intend.
Job descriptions are usually assembled rather than written. A previous posting is copied, a hiring manager adds three technologies, someone in HR appends a paragraph about culture, and legal contributes a line about equal opportunity. The result is a document nobody would choose to read, describing a person nobody expects to find.
That would be a minor inefficiency if candidates ignored it. They do not. For senior engineers, who are not applying broadly and can afford to be selective, the posting is the first and often only evidence of how the organisation thinks.
What the requirement list communicates
A list of fourteen technologies, each marked essential, signals one of two things to an experienced reader: either the role is genuinely incoherent, or nobody involved knows which parts matter. Both are reasons to keep scrolling.
Years-of-experience thresholds create a similar problem. They are a proxy for judgement that correlates weakly with it, and they systematically exclude the people who acquired the judgement faster while including everyone who simply endured.
What strong candidates are actually reading for
- What problem will I be solving? Not the domain — the specific difficulty. Engineers choose roles by the interest of the problem far more often than by the technology stack.
- What does the first six months look like? A posting that can answer this concretely signals a team that has thought about the role rather than one that is simply short-staffed.
- Who will I work with, and what is the standard? Senior people care intensely about the calibre of their colleagues and can rarely determine it from a posting.
- How are decisions made? A single honest sentence about autonomy tells a candidate more than a paragraph about culture.
- What is genuinely hard here? Postings that admit a real constraint read as trustworthy. Postings that describe a company without problems read as marketing.
A test worth applying
Before publishing, show the description to two engineers who already do the job. Ask whether they recognise their role, and whether they would respond to it. The answer is frequently no on both counts, which is useful information obtained cheaply.
The candidates you most want to reach have options and limited patience. They will spend perhaps ninety seconds deciding whether your organisation appears to be a serious place to work. It is worth writing for those ninety seconds rather than for the applicant tracking system.
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