The advert is a filter you did not mean to build
Most job adverts are assembled rather than written. Someone copies the last one, changes the title, adds two requirements a manager mentioned on a call, and pastes in the paragraph about being a fast-paced dynamic environment that has been in circulation since 2015.
The result narrows your pool before a single application arrives. Not through anything anyone would call discrimination, just through wording. Ten years of experience where six would do. A degree requirement nobody has ever checked. Fluent English when the job needs clear English. A list of fourteen essential skills, because nobody wanted to be the person who cut one.
There are plenty of confident statistics floating around about who does and does not apply when requirements look demanding, and they are worth treating carefully. What needs no statistic is simpler: inflated requirements exclude people who could do the job perfectly well. If a requirement is not genuinely necessary, it is a filter operating without your permission.
In plain English
- Essential requirement:
- Something a person genuinely cannot do the job without on day one. Everything else is desirable.
- Inflated requirement:
- A requirement set higher than the job needs, usually copied forward from an older advert.
- Coded language:
- Wording that signals a narrow kind of person, such as ninja, rockstar, or recent graduate.
- Pool:
- Everyone who could realistically do the job and might apply. Your advert decides how much of it you see.
What AI is actually good at here
Three things, all editorial.
Cutting jargon. Paste in your advert and ask for it in plain language. The output will be dull and clear, which is a considerable improvement on lively and vague.
Challenging requirements. Ask it to argue against each requirement, one at a time. This is a surprisingly effective way to notice that nobody can remember why the degree is there.
Rewriting for a specific reader. The same job described for someone changing career reads differently from the same job described for a specialist. You can produce both and see which one describes the role more honestly.
AI has read millions of job adverts, and most job adverts are bad. Left to itself it will happily give you back the same inflated requirements, the same synergy, the same wear many hats. You are editing its work, not accepting it. Every draft it produces needs a human deciding what the job actually requires.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Write a job description for a Marketing Manager.
Output
We are seeking a dynamic, results-driven Marketing Manager to join our fast-paced team. The ideal candidate will have 8 or more years of experience, a Bachelor degree, and a proven track record of driving growth. Must be a self-starter who thrives under pressure.
Every phrase here came from the average of a million bad adverts. It sets eight years for no reason, requires a degree nobody will check, and says nothing about what the person would actually do.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Turn these notes into a job advert. Notes: runs our email programme, owns the content calendar, works with two freelancers, reports to me. Rules: describe what the person does in their first six months, list at most five essential requirements and justify each in one clause, no adjectives about personality, no phrases like fast-paced or self-starter, plain English at reading age 14, under 400 words.
Output
In your first six months you would take over our email programme, which sends twice a week to 30,000 people. Essential: you have run an email programme before, because you would own ours from week two.
It describes the job. The requirements are tied to the work, the constraints blocked the stock phrases, and a career changer can tell whether they could do this.
Turn these notes into a job advert.
Role: [title]
Team and reporting line: [detail]
Notes on what the person actually does: [paste, messy is fine]
Rules:
- Open by describing what this person does in their first six months
- At most five essential requirements, each followed by one clause
explaining why the job cannot be done without it
- Everything else goes in a short desirable list, clearly labelled optional
- No adjectives about personality, no fast-paced, dynamic, rockstar,
self-starter, wear many hats, or thrives under pressure
- Plain English, reading age 14, under 400 words
- Mark anything you had to guess with square brackets
Do not invent responsibilities that are not in my notes.
The requirements interrogation
This is the part that changes your hiring. Take your existing advert and make the tool argue with it.
Here is our current job advert:
[paste it]
For each requirement listed, tell me:
- Whether the job could plausibly be done without it
- What it might be standing in for, if anything
- A lower or broader alternative that would still get us someone capable
- Who it likely screens out that we would want to see
Be sceptical. Assume each requirement is inflated until the advert
justifies it. List anything you think is genuinely essential separately
at the end, with the reason.
You will not accept every suggestion, and you should not. Some requirements are real, some are regulatory, some are the hill your hiring manager will die on. But you will find at least one you cannot justify, and cutting it costs you nothing and widens the pool immediately.
Requirements that exclude one group far more than another can raise real legal questions in many places, even when nobody intended it. Nothing here is legal advice. If a requirement is contested and someone wants to keep it anyway, that is a question for your legal or compliance function, not a debate to settle in a hiring meeting.
Checkpoint
AI is good at cutting jargon and challenging requirements, and bad at knowing what your job needs. Use it to interrogate the advert, then decide the requirements yourself.
Read it back as a candidate
The last check is the cheapest and the one most people skip.
Here is our job advert:
[paste it]
Read it three times, as three different people:
- Someone doing this job well elsewhere, deciding whether to bother applying
- Someone changing career who could learn this quickly
- Someone returning to work after three years out
For each, tell me: what would make them stop reading, what they still
would not know about the job, and whether they would conclude the advert
is not aimed at them. Quote the exact lines that cause each reaction.
Do not rewrite the advert. Just tell me what lands badly.
Then fix the lines it quoted. That is the whole workflow: draft it fast, interrogate the requirements, read it back through other eyes, and keep the final call for yourself.
Save your good adverts. A strong advert you wrote and edited is a far better starting point for the next role than a blank prompt, and it carries your organisation's actual voice rather than the average of everyone else's.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Why do inflated requirements matter even when nobody intends to exclude anyone?