How to describe the role so you get the right shortlist

A good role description takes about ten minutes to write and saves a round of interviews. The shortlists that go wrong almost always trace back to a description of a job title instead of a job.

The four things we need

Tell us what gets done, in the first person: "clears the support queue every morning and escalates anything that looks like a bug." Tell us the hours you want covered, as a window in your own time zone. Tell us which tools the work happens in, including the ugly internal one. And tell us who on your team they report to.

That is the whole description. Everything else is nice to have.

You can skip the job description

Send it if you have one, but we will still ask what the person does in their first week. Job descriptions are written to attract applicants and they drift toward every skill anyone might need. We shortlist against the week, not the wish list.

If you only know the outcome and not the tasks, say that. "Our response time is eight hours and I want it under two" is a description we can work from.

A description that worked

"Shopify developer, mid. Works our theme backlog on a staging theme, ships behind my review, and owns Core Web Vitals. 9am to 5pm Eastern. Shopify, GitHub, Linear, Slack. Reports to me." Four sentences, shortlist in five days, hired the second person they interviewed.