How to write a job post that gets good applicants

A job post is not an advert. Its job is to make the right people apply and the wrong people close the tab, and most agency job posts do the opposite — they attract volume by being vague and warm, then bury the hiring manager in 200 applications that all look the same.

The fix is specificity. Every concrete detail you add loses you applicants you didn't want and gains you ones you did.

The four things that make good candidates skip you

No salary range. The people with options don't apply to guess. They have three other tabs open, two of which say a number. Leaving it out doesn't give you negotiating room; it filters for people with the least leverage.

Adjectives instead of work. "Fast-paced", "wear many hats", "rockstar", "passionate about design". These describe no job. Strong candidates read them as a signal that you haven't defined the role, which is usually correct.

A wishlist instead of a role. Fifteen required skills covering three disciplines. Experienced people read this as one job with three jobs' worth of work. Less experienced people apply anyway, which is the reverse of what you want.

No indication of the work itself. Agency work varies wildly — a five-person studio doing brand identities and a shop running paid media for e-commerce clients need completely different people. If your post could belong to either, nobody good can tell whether they'd enjoy it.

What actually pulls the right people

Specific projects. Real constraints. An honest description of the parts that are hard. Something a candidate can picture themselves doing on a Tuesday.

The counterintuitive one: naming the downsides increases quality of applicants. "You'll juggle four to six clients at once and context-switching is the hardest part of the job" scares off the people who'd have quit in month five, and tells everyone else you're honest about the work. That's rare enough to be a differentiator.

The skeleton

Adapt the bracketed parts. Keep it under about 600 words — the length itself is a signal that you know what you're hiring for.

[Role title] — [Agency name], [location / remote policy]
[Salary range] · [Full-time / part-time] · [Reports to]

WHAT WE DO
[Two or three sentences. What kind of work, for what kind of clients,
at what size. Be concrete: "We're a seven-person studio doing brand
identity and packaging, mostly for food and drink companies between
$5m and $50m in revenue."]

THE ROLE
[Two or three sentences on why this role exists right now. "We've
grown from four to seven people in eighteen months and our senior
designer is now spending half her week on production work. This role
takes that over and grows into leading its own projects."]

WHAT YOU'D ACTUALLY DO
- [A real task, with rough frequency. "Own two to three active
  projects at a time, from kickoff through delivery."]
- [Another. "Run client review calls yourself — we don't have a
  layer of account managers between you and the client."]
- [Another. "Turn around one to two small requests a week for
  retained clients, usually same-day."]
- [Four to six of these. No more.]

WHAT WE NEED
- [Three to five genuine requirements. If you'd hire someone
  without it, it isn't a requirement.]
- [Frame in terms of evidence, not years: "You've run projects
  end-to-end with a client, not just executed someone else's brief."]

NICE TO HAVE
- [Two or three. Explicitly optional.]

THE HONEST BITS
- [Two or three real trade-offs. "We're small, so there's no
  dedicated ops person — you'll book your own calls and chase your
  own assets."]
- [Another. "Client work means client deadlines. Most weeks are
  normal; two or three a year are not."]

WHAT WE OFFER
[Salary range again, in numbers. Leave, working pattern, equipment
budget, learning budget, anything genuinely unusual. Skip anything
that's just legally required where you are.]

HOW TO APPLY
[Exactly what to send. "Send a CV or portfolio link and answer these
two questions in a few sentences each: (1) Describe a project where
the brief changed halfway through — what did you do? (2) What's a
piece of work you're proud of that a client didn't love?"]

[Deadline. What happens next, with rough timings: "We reply to
everyone within two weeks. First stage is a 25-minute call, then a
paid three-hour task, then a final conversation."]

Why the two application questions matter more than the rest

They cost the applicant ten minutes, which removes the people mass-applying to forty roles. They give you something to screen on beyond a portfolio, which tells you what someone can make but not how they think. And they're specific enough that a generic answer is obvious immediately.

Write questions about judgement, not knowledge. "How would you handle a client who rejects the first three concepts?" beats "What's your favourite typeface" or anything with a right answer that can be looked up.

Change the questions for each role you post. Reused questions accumulate public answers.

Small things that measurably change who applies

Put the range in the title area, not at the bottom. People scan.

Say where the work happens and when. "Remote within ±3 hours of CET, two days a month in the studio" is a filter. "Flexible" is not.

Name the tools honestly. If you're on a stack someone will have to learn, say so. Discovering it in week one is worse.

Don't ask for a cover letter. Ask your two questions instead. A cover letter is a generic-output test, and generic output is now free to produce.

Give a real timeline and hold to it. "We reply to everyone within two weeks" is the cheapest reputational advantage available to a small agency, because most don't.

Do this before you post

Take the last job post you wrote and delete every sentence that could appear in a competitor's post for the same role. Whatever survives is your actual pitch. If it's three lines, you have more work to do before you publish — and that work is the same work that makes the hire succeed: deciding precisely what this person does all day.