Most small employers do not write a job advertisement so much as inherit one. A version was drafted for a vacancy some years ago, it produced an acceptable hire, and it has been reposted with the title changed ever since. Nothing about it is wrong exactly, and it is quietly performing worse every year, because the way people search for work and decide whether to apply has changed considerably while the text has not. Five short passes fix most of it in about an hour.
The First Pass Is the Pay Line
If there is no figure in the advertisement, that is the largest single problem and everything else is secondary. Candidates increasingly read an absent number as a poor one, the strongest applicants filter those postings out first, and the entire screening process ends up being conducted by phone at fifteen minutes a call to establish something that could have been stated in nine words. A range with the basis attached, saying what determines where somebody lands within it, does the work.
A meaningful number of states now require a range on postings outright, and the direction of travel is consistent enough that a small employer is better off adopting the practice regardless of local rule. If the honest range is wide because the role could be filled at two different levels, say that plainly, because a wide stated range is read as candor while no range at all is read as evasion.
The Second Pass Is the Title, Which Is a Search Term
Internal job titles are the enemy of being found. A position advertised as a Service Delivery Associate is invisible to everybody typing the words people actually search for, and clever titles perform worse still. The title should be the plainest possible description of the trade or function, with any seniority marker after it, and any internal name can appear in the body where it will not affect whether the posting surfaces. Location deserves the same treatment in the same pass, since a posting naming a metropolitan area rather than the town where the work happens attracts applicants facing a commute they discover at interview, and vagueness about whether the work is on site or remote now gets a posting filtered out before it is read.
The Third Pass Is the Requirements List
Requirements lists accumulate. Each vacancy adds a line and none ever gets removed, and after three cycles the advertisement asks for a combination of attributes that the current postholder does not possess. Every extra requirement deters capable applicants who read the list as a threshold while barely inconveniencing those inclined to apply regardless, which means the list selects against exactly the people whose self assessment is accurate. The discipline is to cut to two genuine requirements and one honest preference. A genuine requirement is something without which the person could not do the job in the first month: a license, a certification, the physical capacity for the work. Everything else is a preference, and stated years of experience are the weakest proxy on the list, since they measure duration rather than capability and exclude the person who did the same work more intensively for less time.
The Fourth Pass Covers the Schedule and the Week
This is where the honest advertisement separates itself from the generic one. Say what the hours are, whether they vary, what the on call or weekend expectation is, and what a normal week actually contains rather than describing the role at its most interesting. The features that cause people to leave belong here, stated plainly: the drive, the Saturday mornings in season, the two hours a week of a task nobody enjoys, the lifting. Including them feels like sabotage and works as the opposite. The applicant who reads them and applies anyway has priced them in and will not resign in week six over something they were never told, and the applicant who does not apply has saved both parties a month. The clearest test is whether somebody currently doing the work would recognize the description as their own job.
The Fifth Pass, and the Two Paragraphs to Delete
The last pass is the ask, and it should be one thing. A phone number and a good time to call, or two sentences about the closest work they have done, or a single example. Long application processes requiring an account, a tailored letter, and three references are met most reliably by people with time on their hands, which correlates with very little that an employer is trying to select for.
Then delete two things outright. The paragraph describing the company as a dynamic team in a fast paced environment, which appears in every advertisement and therefore distinguishes nothing, and the paragraph of boilerplate about being a values driven organization committed to excellence. Replace both with two sentences of concrete fact: how many people work there, what the business actually does, and how long the person they are replacing was in the role. An advertisement that comes back with a dozen replies instead of ninety has not underperformed. It has done the screening in advance, in public, before anybody spent an afternoon on the phone.