Common job description mistakes: how to avoid them and what to replace them with?

**In this article, we'll break down common job description mistakes and how to fix them to help you hire real talent more effectively.
**

1. A long list of technical requirements. If you decide to list absolutely all the technical skills of a developer, be prepared to face a situation in which candidates either begin to doubt their abilities or decide that they will not have the opportunity to learn something new. Perhaps an employee who meets the requirements by 50-75% will suit you, which is important to indicate in the text. It is even better if you reduce the list of requirements to a couple of critical criteria and specify desirable but optional skills that can be acquired in your company. This approach will allow you to find a developer who is more flexible and ready to learn, than a specialist who has stopped at a defined list of programming languages, which will be difficult to switch to other tasks or new industry trends.

**2. **Adding typical or legally binding requirements to the company's benefits. If the job description includes benefits such as annual vacation or the provision of equipment for work, it is worth thinking about the formation of additional motivations that can distinguish your company from competitors. It is worth remembering that the candidate considers many vacancies and will pay attention to what others do not have. For example, a certain number of working days when you can work remotely, corporate events/psychologists, team building, additional holidays, and meals.

3. Description of typical and obvious duties. If you include working with documents, reporting, application development, and writing and checking code into the area of ​​responsibility, then the candidate may get bored even while reading the job description. These are obvious duties of the candidate for this position, and therefore their inclusion in the description is ineffective during hiring. It is better to describe what is unique about this work, what global problems this work solves and what the culture of developers looks like inside the company, what motivates them to come to work every day. This will allow you to stand out against the background of other vacancies and catch the candidate's attention.

We also recommend describing the selection process. What stages should the candidate expect if he responds and what are the selection criteria? This will allow you to assess the company's way of thinking and emphasize that it values ​​the time of each party.

An effective tool is to distribute links to the product itself or blog posts about your company. This will allow the candidate to learn more about the business, and assess the professional reputation and corporate culture.

One of the most important criteria in the job description is the open salary range. By allowing candidates to see the financial motivation, you emphasize that you are willing to fairly evaluate each person's performance, based only on their experience and skills, not on the way salary negotiations are conducted.

We advise you to treat the job description as a company resume. After all, the hiring process is a two-way process in which both a company chooses from among several candidates and many companies compete for the same talent.