Is your job description too generic (or quietly biased)?

If a competitor could repost your job ad with only the company name swapped, it is too generic. If some candidates read it and conclude it is not meant for them before they even reach the requirements, it is quietly biased. Most job descriptions fail at least one of four checks: clichés that say nothing, coded language that filters people you wanted, inflated requirements, and a missing salary. All four are catchable in a fifteen-minute audit before you publish.

Why does a generic job ad cost you candidates?

Generic ads do damage in both directions. Strong candidates skim, find nothing concrete to weigh, and move on. Weak fits apply anyway, because vague requirements exclude nobody, so screening load rises while quality drops. And the ad is the first artifact of your hiring process candidates ever see: boilerplate ad, boilerplate process, they assume.

Specificity is a free filter, and its cheapest source is the hiring manager conversation you already had. Write from real intake notes instead of last year’s template; we walk through that in turning intake notes into a job description.

Does your ad pass the cliché detector?

Circle every phrase that could appear, unchanged, in an ad for a completely different company. Candidates have read these a thousand times and learned to translate them, usually unfavourably.

Cliché	What candidates actually read	Write instead
Rockstar, ninja, guru	“They cannot describe the job”	The real title and the systems or accounts you will own
Fast-paced environment	“Understaffed, expect overtime”	The actual cadence: “we ship weekly”, “two campaigns a quarter”
Work hard, play hard	“Long hours plus mandatory fun”	What the hours genuinely are, including the flexible parts
Wear many hats	“The role is undefined”	The three responsibilities that fill most weeks
We are like a family	“Boundaries will be tested”	One honest sentence on how the team works together
Competitive salary	“Lower than you are hoping”	The number, or at least the band

The test for any replacement line: could a candidate verify it or challenge it in the interview? “Dynamic team” cannot be verified. “You will own onboarding for our two largest clients within three months” can, and it attracts the candidates who want exactly that.

What does coded language actually look like?

Coded language is rarely intentional: one person writes the ad in their own voice and nobody reads it as an outsider. Four patterns cover most of it:

• Gender-coded vocabulary. Some words read masculine (dominant, fearless, crush, relentless), others feminine (supportive, nurturing, collaborative). Neither set is forbidden; a wall of one is a signal, and the fix is describing the work instead of the warrior.
• Age coding. “Digital native”, “young and energetic team”, “recent graduates” all say the same thing: over forty need not apply. If the job genuinely needs current knowledge of a tool, name the tool.
• Origin coding. Requiring a “native speaker” when you mean professional fluency filters by birthplace, not by skill, and in several EU countries that distinction has legal weight. Write “fluent Dutch (C1 or higher)” instead.
• Availability coding. “Thrives under pressure”, “always on”, and a rigid full-time office requirement with no stated reason quietly tell carers and parents this is not for them. If the job truly needs on-site presence or on-call shifts, say so and say why; otherwise drop the machismo.

Across all four, bias hides in vibe words and vanishes when you replace them with actual working conditions.

Are your requirements filtering out the people you want?

The requirements section is where good candidates are lost invisibly. Candidates commonly treat your list as a set of knockout rules even when you meant it as a wish list, and the people most likely to self-reject over one missing line are often the careful, conscientious applicants you wanted most.

Three inflation patterns to audit:

1. Wish-list musts. Ten bullet points of which four matter. Split the list honestly; must-have versus nice-to-have skills is the discipline, and four to six true knockouts is a healthy ceiling.
2. Arbitrary year counts. “Five years of experience” is usually a proxy for “can work independently”, so write the actual capability. The classic failure is demanding more years with a framework than the framework has existed, which tells engineers your ad was not reviewed by one.
3. Degree creep. If your best performer in the role lacks the degree you are about to require, the requirement is decoration, and it disproportionately removes career switchers and people who learned on the job.

The audit question for every line: would we reject an otherwise great candidate over this? If not, it moves to nice to have or gets deleted.

Why is “competitive salary” no longer acceptable?

Two reasons, one legal and one practical. Legally, the EU Pay Transparency Directive gives applicants the right to the initial pay or pay range before the interview stage, and member states have been writing it into national law, several requiring the range in the ad itself. The era of discovering the budget in the second interview is ending.

Practically, a published range pre-screens for you. Candidates who need more do not apply, candidates who apply have already accepted the band, and the late-stage collapse over money largely disappears. If you do not know the honest band, researching market salaries is a half-day task, not a project.

Before and after: two rewrites

Before: “We are looking for a rockstar developer to join our fast-paced, dynamic team. The ideal candidate is a self-starter who wears many hats and thrives under pressure. Competitive salary for the right candidate.”

After: “We need a backend developer to take over our payments integration (Python, PostgreSQL). You will own two services end to end, ship weekly, and work with one other engineer and a product manager. Hybrid from Utrecht, two office days. Salary: [your real band].”

Before: “Digital native wanted for our young, energetic support team. We work hard and play hard. Must be willing to do whatever it takes for our customers.”

After: “You will join a support team of five, handling Dutch and English tickets for our accounting product. Core hours 9 to 15, the rest flexible. We measure response quality, not hours at a desk. Salary: [your real band].”

Neither rewrite is longer. Both swap every vibe word for something a candidate can verify, and both state pay.

The fifteen-minute audit

Run this on the draft:

• Delete every adjective that could describe any company (dynamic, exciting, fast-paced, innovative).
• Tag each requirement must or nice; cap musts at four to six, each with a knockout justification.
• Check every year count and degree against what the job actually needs.
• Scan for gender, age, origin and availability coding; replace vibes with working conditions.
• Add the salary band. “Competitive” is not a band.
• Replace responsibilities boilerplate with the three things that fill the first three months.
• Hand it to someone outside the team and ask what the job is. If they cannot say, candidates cannot either.

Where does Recruitifly fit?

The audit has a natural home in an EU-built ATS. Recruitifly’s assistant Fly prepares postings for the major boards (Indeed, LinkedIn, StepStone, Reed and more) from one place, and because every write is propose-then-confirm, the exact ad text always gets a final review before anything publishes. That confirm step is the right moment to run this checklist one last time. Recruitifly is in private beta; if you want to see a posting go from intake notes to several boards with you approving each step, talk to us.