Job Posting

What a job posting is (and is not)

A job posting is marketing with legal constraints. Its job is to get the right people to apply and the wrong people to self-select out, quickly. It is built from the job description, but it is not the job description. The JD is the internal record of duties and requirements; the posting picks the parts a candidate cares about and presents them in the order they care about them.

Postings go to your careers site first, then out to a job board or several, aggregators, social channels, and sometimes through programmatic job advertising, which buys clicks or applies across many sites and moves budget automatically to whatever converts.

How to write a job posting

Use this order. It mirrors what candidates scan for, especially on mobile.

1. Title candidates search for. Customer Service Representative, not Customer Delight Champion. Add the shift or location if it matters: Warehouse Associate, Night Shift, Reno NV.
2. Pay and schedule in the first lines. Hourly rate or range, shift times, full-time or part-time, start date.
3. A short paragraph on what the day looks like. Concrete: you will take 40 to 60 inbound calls a day about billing and service changes.
4. Four to six main duties.
5. Must-have requirements only. Three to five, all genuinely required.
6. Benefits and anything that differentiates you: weekly pay, paid training, coverage start date, tuition help.
7. How hiring works and how long it takes. Apply in five minutes, hear back within a day, interview this week.
8. Equal opportunity statement and accommodation contact.

Aim for roughly 300 to 600 words for hourly roles. Our job posting template follows this structure, and our post on job posting templates that work includes filled-in examples.

Measuring whether a posting works

The core number is the apply rate: completed applications divided by views of the posting. For high-volume hourly roles, a common benchmark range is roughly 5 to 15 percent on job boards; postings well below that usually have a pay, title or length problem. Also track qualified-applicant rate (how many pass screening), cost per applicant by source, and how many applicants become hires.

Test one change at a time. A typical experiment: two versions of the same posting, one with pay in the first line and one with pay near the bottom. Run both for a week on the same budget and compare apply rate and qualified rate. Teams that run small tests like this every month usually find the title and the first three lines matter more than everything else combined.

Pay transparency and other legal requirements

A growing list of US states and cities require pay ranges in job postings, including Colorado, California, Washington, New York State and New York City, with others following. Requirements differ: some require a good-faith range, some also require a general description of benefits, and some apply to any employer with employees in the state even for remote roles. Check our glossary entry on pay transparency and current state rules before posting.

Other points that apply broadly:

• Avoid language that signals a preference based on a protected characteristic: young and energetic, recent graduate, native English speaker, digital native.
• State physical requirements as job functions, not personal traits.
• Federal contractors have job-listing obligations with state employment services under VEVRAA.
• Include an accommodation contact so candidates with disabilities can request help applying.

Rules vary by state and country; this is general information, not legal advice.

Common job posting mistakes

• Pasting the full JD. Long, internal-language postings lose mobile readers fast.
• Clever titles. Nobody searches for Ninja or Rockstar, and job boards rank by title match.
• Hiding pay. Postings without pay typically get fewer applications, and in many states it is now illegal.
• Requirement lists of 12 or more items. Many qualified people, especially women and career changers, will not apply unless they meet nearly every listed item.
• Leaving stale postings up. An evergreen posting for a role you are no longer hiring for wastes candidate time and spend. Close or pause it, or make it clear it is a continuous pipeline.
• No timeline. Telling candidates how fast the process moves is free and improves completion.

Job postings in high-volume hiring

When you hire the same role across dozens of locations, write one strong master posting per role and localize only the fields that change: pay, address, shift, site perks. This keeps the message consistent, makes testing possible and avoids recruiters improvising requirements. Duplicate postings for the same role in the same city can be penalized by some job boards, so use one posting per location rather than ten nearly identical ones. Refresh posting dates and content regularly rather than reposting the same text, which many aggregators detect.