I used to copy job descriptions from company careers pages I admired. Big mistake.
Those companies are optimising for volume — thousands of applicants, large HR teams to filter them, and the luxury of time. You have none of those things.
When you write a job post like a Fortune 500, you get Fortune 500 applicants — people who want stability, process, and a clear career ladder. Not people who thrive in chaos, make decisions with 40% of the information, and care more about impact than title.
What Corporate Job Posts Actually Signal
“Competitive compensation” means you won’t tell them the salary. “Dynamic environment” means organised chaos you haven’t fixed yet. “Opportunity to make an impact” means the role isn’t well-defined.
Every candidate who’s been around reads these phrases and either self-selects out or lowers their expectations before the first call.
If your job post could belong to any company, it belongs to no company. It should be instantly, obviously yours.
What a Startup Job Post Should Do Instead
Your job post has one job: get the right person excited and get the wrong person to self-select out. Not to attract maximum applications. Maximum applications is a trap — it just creates more work for you.
Open with the real situation. “We’re 8 people, post-seed, and we just signed our 20th customer. We need someone to own X because the founder doing it is the bottleneck.” That’s more compelling than any job title.
Say what they’ll actually do. Not a list of responsibilities — a description of what their week looks like. What decisions will they make? What does success look like in 90 days?
Tell them what you’re not. The “You might not be a fit if…” section is the highest-leverage line in any job post. “This role isn’t right if you need a clear process before you can start” — that one sentence filters out more wrong candidates than 3 rounds of interviews.
Be honest about the hard parts. Candidates who join knowing the challenges stay longer and perform better than those who arrived expecting something different.
The Prompt That Writes This For You
Write a startup job post for [role]. Context: [2 sentences about company stage, size, and what changed that made you need this hire]. What they’ll own: [outcomes not tasks]. Their first 90 days: [specific deliverables]. What makes this hard: [honest challenges]. You might not be a fit if: [3 red flags]. Tone: direct, specific, human — like a smart founder wrote it at 10pm, not an HR department.
When I switched to this format, my application volume dropped by 60% and my offer acceptance rate went up by 40%. Fewer applications, better people, faster hires.
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