Write the job post so the wrong people don't apply

Put the pay in the post. Second line, before anything else you want to say about your company.

"$22 to $26 an hour depending on whether you can run a MIG welder" does more filtering in eleven words than three paragraphs about culture ever will. Everybody who'd need $31 stops reading and goes somewhere else, which is a favor to both of you. Everybody who's making $19 down the road and can weld just found a reason to keep going.

Posts without a number get more applicants. That's the whole argument for leaving it out, and it's a bad one. You don't want more applicants. You want six good ones and a short week.

Trade the clever title for the searched one

Nobody types "customer happiness specialist" into a job board. They type "dispatcher." They type "diesel mechanic," "bookkeeper," "warehouse lead," "front desk."

Whatever the job is actually called in your trade, that's the title. Save the internal name for the offer letter. If your org chart says "Client Success Partner" and the market says "account manager," the market wins, because the market is where the person you want is standing right now with their thumb on a screen.

One exception worth naming. If the title genuinely carries weight for a candidate who's moving up, use it. "Shop Foreman" pulls harder than "Senior Technician" for a guy who's been waiting eight years to stop being called senior anything. Titles are cheap and they matter. Just make sure the title you post is the title they'd search.

Describe the first ninety days instead of the ideal person

The standard job description is a wish list. Five years of experience, degree preferred, strong communicator, detail oriented, team player, thrives in a fast-paced environment. It describes nobody. It could be pasted into a competitor's ad tonight and not one person would notice.

Flip it. Write what the person will actually be doing in their first three months, in their words, with the real nouns from your business in it.

Something like this:

• You'll open the shop at 6:00 a.m. and have the board built before the techs walk in at 6:30.
• You'll take about 40 calls a day, half of them from people whose truck is already down.
• You'll own the warranty claims backlog. It's currently about 60 open and it's ugly.
• By month three you'll be running the Monday schedule meeting without me in the room.

A candidate reads that and knows within twenty seconds whether they want it. That's the entire job of the posting. Not to sell. To sort.

Say the hard part out loud

Every job has one. The commute, the customer base, the hours, the software nobody likes, the fact that the last person left because the volume got heavy in the fall and never really let up.

Write it down.

I had a guy call about a dispatcher role and his first question was whether the 6 a.m. start was a real 6 a.m. or an aspirational one. It was real. He'd already made peace with it before he dialed, because it was in the ad. He took the job. The two people who would've quit in week three over that same alarm clock never applied, and I never spent a dollar training them.

There's a version of honesty that turns into an apology, and you don't want that either. Don't write "warning: this job is hard." Write the specific hard thing, flat, like a fact. "December is our heaviest month and everybody works two Saturdays." That's not a confession. That's information.

Cut the requirements list until it hurts

Take your bullet list of qualifications and ask one question of each line: would I actually reject a great candidate who didn't have this?

Most of them, no. Degree preferred? You've hired four people without one and two of them run departments. Five years experience? You'd take three if the three were good. Proficiency in a spreadsheet program? Everyone says yes to that and half of them are lying, so it's screening nothing.

What's left is usually short. A license. A certification the state requires. A physical requirement that's genuinely part of the work. Clean driving record if they're in a company truck. Keep those, because those are real gates. Delete the rest and put them in a "nice to have" line or nowhere at all.

Long requirement lists don't raise your quality. They just talk your best borderline candidate out of hitting send, and your best borderline candidate is frequently the person you end up promoting.

Name the boss, the schedule, and the ceiling

Three things people want to know that most posts never answer. Who do I report to. When do I work. Where does this go.

"You'll report directly to me. I own the company." That's a selling point at a 12-person shop, so use it. At 60 people, name the role: "reports to the Service Manager, who's been here nine years."

Schedule means actual hours and actual days, including whether the phone rings after 6:00 p.m. and whether that's compensated.

The ceiling is the one people forget. If this job leads somewhere, say where. If it doesn't, say that too, because there's a large population of excellent workers who want a steady job with a clean end to the day and no ladder attached. Hiding a dead-end job as a career path gets you a resignation in fourteen months.

Put one instruction in that filters

End the post with a specific, small ask. "In your email, tell me the last piece of equipment you troubleshot and what it turned out to be." Two sentences is plenty.

Half the applicants won't do it. That half was mass-applying to sixty postings with one attachment and would've been a waste of a phone screen. The ones who answer have read the whole post, which is the first work sample you'll ever get from them, free.

Don't make it a puzzle or a personality test. It's a doorbell. You're just checking who bothers to ring it.

The part that'll bother you

Publish a pay range and your current employees will read it. Every one of them, within about a day, and they'll do the math against their own check.

So do that math first. If your posted range starts above what a loyal five-year guy is making, you have a compensation problem that existed before the job post and you were just getting away with it. Fix it, or be ready to explain it in person, on purpose, before somebody forwards the link to the group chat.

And a narrow post gets fewer résumés. If you're staffing a seasonal warehouse and you need thirty bodies by Monday, go wide and sort later. Precision is for the roles where a bad hire costs you six months.

For everything else, write the post as if you're describing the job to a friend who might actually take it. If it doesn't sound like your business when you read it out loud, it won't sound like anywhere worth working.