Here's a quiet problem I keep seeing, and it's not that your posting is bad. It's that it's written for the wrong reader.
Think about it. Who is actually going to read this job posting? A person on their phone, scrolling past six other jobs, giving each one maybe eight seconds. They're not trying to understand your company. They're asking one question:
Is this for me?
But most postings answer a different question — "what do *we* need and who do *we* think this person should be." Which is a great question to have. Just not the one the candidate has in front of them.
So let's flip it.
The title is doing more work than you think
A lot of shops write the title the way they'd describe the role to a friend. "Electrician." "Line technician." "Fleet maintenance — needs to know wiring, hydraulics, and diesel."
Meanwhile, the person actually doing that job searches for "line mechanic," "industrial maintenance tech," or "millwright." They never see your posting. Not because you're a bad employer, but because your title uses a different word than the one in their head.
This is the single highest-leverage fix in this whole post, and it's nearly free. Jobscan's research found that when the title on a posting matched the title on a candidate's resume, the interview rate jumped about ten times. That's their data, not mine — but the direction is clear and it lines up with what I see: the title is the handshake. Get the handshake right and everything else gets a chance to matter.
So here's the exercise. Before you write a word of the description, ask three people who actually hold this job what they call it — and what they'd type into a search bar at 9 p.m. on their phone. Write down their words. Then make sure at least one of them is in your title.
You don't need to be clever. You need to be findable.
"Required" is where good people walk away
Now the body. Open a posting and scroll to the list of requirements. Chances are it has a long "Required" section and a short "nice to have" section — and the nice-to-have section is where the best people actually live.
Here's the thing about the "Required" list: every box on it is a reason for a good candidate to close the tab. They read "five years experience in a union environment" and they're a four-year person who'd do the job in a month — and they're already gone. Not because they're underqualified. Because they read one line and decided it wasn't for them.
But the "nice to have" list? That's where you can be honest without scaring people off. A lot of the skills your best candidates are going to *learn on the job* live here, and that's fine — it's how most skilled trades people grew into the roles they're in now. The moment you promote "nice to have" into "required," you've turned a growth role into a perfect-resume role, and perfect resumes are rare.
Practical fix: move anything you can teach into the "we'll help you get there" or "nice to have" column. Keep "required" for the things that are genuinely non-negotiable — a license, a certification, a physical requirement, something you can't shortcut. That's it. If a requirement isn't non-negotiable, it's a filter that costs you good people, not a filter that protects you.
Write it for the eight-second reader
You don't have a paragraph to win them. You have a screenful.
So front-load the two or three things that will actually decide whether this is for them: what they'll do day to day, what it pays (or a range, if you can), and the one thing about the role that isn't in every other posting. If it's schedule, say it. If it's a real growth path, say it. If you're not a startup with unlimited equity but you do have the thing they actually want, put it first.
And cut the corporate throat-clearing. "Join our dynamic team of passionate professionals committed to excellence" — that's four adjectives and zero information. A candidate can't make a decision from it. Replace it with one concrete, honest sentence about what the work is and what's good about it. Specific beats impressive every time.
The one sentence that changes the whole thing
There's a line I'd put in almost every posting, and I'd put it near the top:
"If you've got most of this and the rest you're willing to learn, we want to talk."
That one line tells three things at once. It tells them you're not gatekeeping. It tells them you'll actually consider them. And it tells them you're a normal, decent place to work, because decent places don't have to pretend to be perfect to hire.
It costs nothing. And it's usually the line a good candidate remembers about you.
What to actually do today
This isn't a rewrite-from-scratch project. It's a fifteen-minute pass over the posting that's up right now:
- The title — does it use the word the person doing this job actually types?
- The "Required" list — can you move at least two items into "nice to have" without lying?
- The first screenful — does it say what the work is, what it pays, and the one thing that's different?
- The invitation — is there a line that tells a good-but-not-perfect candidate they still belong?
If you can do those four, you've already changed who you're hearing from. You're not going to fix the whole market with a job posting. But you can stop being the posting that a good person scrolls past in eight seconds — and that's a problem worth fixing before you spend a single dollar on more reach.
The posting isn't marketing. It's the first conversation you have with someone, and the first impression you're going to get. Write it for the person on the other side, and the good ones will find their way to you.