Job Advert Writer

Job Advert Writer

Turns an internal job specification into an advert that makes a case rather than lists requirements. Produces a diagnosis of the original, a rewritten advert, and the channel variants the role actually needs.

The advert is usually the only piece of employer marketing a candidate reads, and it is almost always the worst-written asset the company owns. It is typically written by the hiring manager, for the hiring manager, inherited from the last time the role was open, and optimised for internal sign-off. The result reads as a list of demands issued to someone who has not yet decided they want the job — and the people it deters most reliably are exactly the ones worth reaching: employed, in demand, not searching, and reading it on a phone with about forty seconds of patience.

The job is not to make the advert nicer. It is to make it persuasive to someone who does not have to reply.

What you need to start

Take whatever the user has: a pasted job description, an uploaded file, a link to a live posting, or a role brief from hiring-manager-intake. If they give you a link, fetch it — what is actually published is often worse than the internal document they think they are sending you.

If they have no spec at all, ask four things and nothing more:

1. Role and level
2. What this person will actually do — the first big thing waiting for them
3. Why the role exists, and why now
4. Who they report to and who they work with day to day

Then write the advert. If they answer two of the four, write it anyway, mark the gaps inline as [TO CONFIRM], and say specifically what each gap costs — an advert with no answer to "why now" reads as a backfill nobody is excited about, and that is a real conversion cost, not a formatting nitpick.

Never stall. A draft the user corrects in five minutes beats a questionnaire they abandon. Almost every input gap here can be filled with a labelled assumption and fixed on review.

Ask early, in one line, where the role is posted — the jurisdiction determines pay transparency obligations, and it is much cheaper to know before drafting than after.

Where the environment supports structured multiple-choice questions (Cowork's AskUserQuestion or equivalent), prefer it for the small-set choices — jurisdiction, level, and which channel variants they need — and keep free text for the role detail, where the specifics are the whole point.

Process

1. Diagnose the original before you rewrite it

Lead with this. It is the part that teaches the user something, and it is what makes them trust the rewrite that follows rather than treating it as one more opinion about wording.

Keep it to five to eight specific observations, each quoting the actual text and naming the cost. Generic critique ("it's a bit corporate") is worthless. Diagnose against these:

• Order. How far down does the reader get before learning what they would actually do? If the first 150 words are about the company's founding, its market position and its values, the advert has spent its only real attention budget on the reader's least urgent question.
• Direction of address. Count sentences about what the company wants versus what the candidate gets. Most specs run heavily one way. "The successful candidate will be responsible for" is the house style of a document written for an approvals process.
• The requirements list. Length, and how many items are genuinely disqualifying. This is where the most damage happens — see step 3.
• Specificity. Could this advert be for any company hiring this title? If yes, it does no work. The details that persuade are the ones only true of this role.
• Unanswered questions. Which of the candidate's seven questions (step 2) does it never answer? Missing pay, missing manager, missing process is standard.
• Language that narrows the pool. Run references/language-audit.md over it and report what it catches, with the replacement.
• Readability. Sentence length, paragraph length, jargon and acronym density, whether anything load-bearing is trapped in an image.

Then say plainly what it is costing: fewer applications, a narrower and more homogeneous applicant set, more screening time spent on people who did not understand the role, and candidates arriving at interview sold on something the job is not.

2. Rewrite around the candidate's questions, in their order

Candidates read in a fixed order, and it is not the order internal specs are written in. Structure the advert to answer these, in this sequence:

1. What is this job, actually? In plain words, in the first two sentences.
2. Why does it exist, and why now? New team, funded growth, a problem someone has decided to solve. "Why now" is the single most under-used persuasive fact in recruiting and almost no advert includes it.
3. What will I be doing in the first year? Concrete, sequenced, real. This is the section that converts.
4. Who will I work with, and who do I report to? Name the manager and their background. People join teams and managers.
5. Why is this a good move for me? The honest case — scope, ownership, what they will be able to do next that they cannot do now. Include the trade-offs; credibility is persuasive and the drawbacks surface at interview anyway.
6. What does it pay? See step 5.
7. What is the process, and how long will it take? Stages, rough timeline, who they meet. Removing uncertainty removes a reason not to start.

Requirements come after the case is made, not before it. A reader who has decided the job is interesting reads a requirements list as "can I do this?"; a reader who has not decided reads it as "am I allowed to apply?" — and drops out.

references/advert-anatomy.md has the section-by-section detail, what each section must achieve, and worked weak-versus-strong examples. Read it before writing the first draft.

3. Cut the requirements list, hard

This is the highest-leverage edit in the whole document and it is the one the user will resist, so make the argument explicitly.

Separate the list into three buckets:

• Genuine must-haves — someone has actually failed in this job, or an adjacent one, without this. Aim for three to five. If the list runs to ten, it is a wish list.
• Learnable here — real for the role but acquirable in the first few months. Move these into the first-year section as "you'll pick up X", where they read as growth rather than as a gate.
• Nice-to-haves — say so, in a short separate list, and say plainly that nobody is expected to have all of them.

Then explain the mechanism, because it is the part that changes behaviour: a fifteen-item list is a description of nobody, and it is read two different ways. A candidate who assesses themselves conservatively reads the list as a gate and counts themselves out unless they clear nearly every line. A confident one reads the same list as aspirational and applies on a partial match. So the long list does not raise the quality bar. It changes who applies, in a direction nobody chose, while cutting volume across the board.

Add one line to the advert that does real work: "If you meet most of this and the role excites you, apply." It is not a platitude; it is an explicit instruction that overrides the conservative reading.

Test every surviving requirement with the same question: has someone done this job well without it? If yes, it is not a must-have.

4. Run the language audit

Read references/language-audit.md and apply it. It covers vague signalling language and superlatives, degree requirements filtering on access rather than capability, years-of-experience thresholds standing in for capability (and acting as an age proxy), physical requirements that are not genuinely essential, culture language that proxies for age or lifestyle, and insider jargon and acronyms. For each pattern it gives the replacement, not just the flag.

Make the commercial argument alongside the legal one, because the commercial one is what gets the edit accepted: this language costs applications and narrows the pool it does reach. The legal exposure is real, and in several jurisdictions specific to advertising, but "fewer and worse applicants" is the argument that wins the meeting.

5. Handle pay

Ask which jurisdictions the role is posted in, then verify current pay transparency requirements with a web search rather than asserting them from memory. This area changes faster than any model's training data: US states and cities, several EU member states implementing the EU Pay Transparency Directive, and others have added or amended requirements recently, and the specifics — whether a range is required, whether it must be in the posting itself, what counts as a good-faith range, whether benefits must be described — vary. Cite what you find. Flag that the final wording needs local review; this skill produces the draft and the questions, not compliance sign-off.

Separately, make the case for publishing a range even where nothing requires it:

• A candidate who does not see a number assumes the worst or assumes nothing, and the strongest people — who have options and are not searching — will not spend a screening call to find out.
• Screening on pay in the advert removes the most common cause of late-stage offer failure, which is expensive precisely because it happens after everyone's time is spent.
• Applications self-select toward the level being paid for. Fewer, better-matched applicants is the outcome, and it is a better outcome than more applicants.
• Internally, refusing to publish a range is usually a signal that the band will not survive contact with the market — which is worth knowing in week one rather than week nine. That belongs in hiring-manager-intake or headcount-business-case, not in the advert.

If the user will not publish a number, do not stall or moralise. Write the advert without one, and add a line that does the next best thing: the level being hired at and a commitment to discuss range on the first call.

6. Accessibility and readability pass

The advert is read on phones, by people with limited time, by non-native speakers of the language it is written in, and by screen readers. Apply:

• Plain language. Short common words. Active voice. "You'll own the pricing model", not "the successful candidate will be responsible for the ownership of pricing methodology."
• Sentence length. Aim around 15-20 words average; break anything over 30. Vary it, or it reads as a manual.
• Paragraph length. Two to three sentences. Long blocks are skipped on mobile.
• Structure for screen readers. Real headings in a logical order, real bullet lists, no headings faked with bold text. Descriptive link text — "how we interview", never "click here".
• No load-bearing text in images. Salary, requirements or process trapped in a graphic is invisible to screen readers and to search.
• Expand every acronym on first use, or cut it. Internal acronyms in an external advert signal that the document was never rewritten for the reader.
• Say how to request an adjustment, with a named contact route, and mean it.

7. Produce the channel variants

One advert does not work everywhere. Produce all four, and explain what changes and why — the user needs to be able to maintain them when the role changes.

Use assets/advert-template.md as the output skeleton; it carries all four variants.

8. Offer the interactive version — do not build it unprompted

For some roles, showing beats describing: a commission role with a live earnings model the candidate can move sliders on, a team structure they can see, a first-90-days timeline, a day-in-the-life. Offer a single-file interactive HTML version of the advert for these, and build it only if the user says yes. Most roles do not need it and an unasked-for microsite is a distraction from the copy, which is what actually converts.

Output

A Markdown file, written to disk, containing in this order:

1. Diagnosis of the original — five to eight specific observations, each quoting the text and naming the cost. Skip if there was no original.
2. The rewritten advert — full careers-site version.
3. Channel variants — LinkedIn, outreach opener, referral version.
4. What changed and why — a short table mapping the significant edits to the reason, so the user can defend each one to the hiring manager who wrote the original.
5. Requirements decisions — what was cut, what was moved to nice-to-have, what was moved into the first-year section, and the must-haves that survived.
6. Pay section — the range as published, plus what the jurisdiction check found, cited.
7. Open questions and assumptions — every [TO CONFIRM], what it costs to leave it blank, and who can answer it.

Lead with the diagnosis; a CPO or Head of TA reading only the first section should still learn something they can use on the next twenty adverts.

Then offer — without building unprompted — a Word version for sign-off, the interactive HTML version where it fits, or a short one-page rationale for a hiring manager who is attached to the original wording.

Legal and ethical guardrails

• Advertising is regulated differently from the rest of hiring. Wording that suggests a preference on age, sex, race, religion, disability, national origin, family status or other protected characteristics creates exposure at the point of publication, before a single application arrives. This skill flags language likely to have that effect and proposes replacements; it does not certify an advert as compliant. Have the final wording reviewed locally, particularly for roles posted in several jurisdictions at once.
• Pay transparency rules vary and change. Ask which jurisdictions apply and verify the current requirement by web search at drafting time, citing the source. Do not state a rule from memory.
• Requirements must be job-related. Degree requirements, years-of-experience thresholds and physical requirements that are not genuinely essential narrow the pool along lines nobody chose and are the requirements most often challenged. Where one is genuinely essential — a licence, a legal qualification, a physical capability the work truly requires — keep it, and state it precisely rather than broadly.
• Diversity statements should describe what you do, not what you feel. A sentence claiming commitment is worth nothing next to a described practice: structured interviews, published ranges, a named adjustments contact, flexible working stated specifically. Write the practice or write nothing; candidates read boilerplate as boilerplate.
• Do not promise what the process cannot deliver. A stated timeline and stage count in the advert becomes a commitment. If the process actually takes seven weeks, say seven.

Reference files

• references/advert-anatomy.md — read before writing the first draft. Section by section: what each must achieve, how it fails, and worked before-and-after examples of a weak and a strong version of each. This is the reference that carries the skill.
• references/language-audit.md — read at the diagnosis step and again before final output. The pattern, why it costs applications, and the replacement to write instead.
• assets/advert-template.md — the output skeleton, including all four channel variants.

Handoff

The competencies and outcomes the advert sells should be the same ones the loop assesses. Pass the first-year section and the surviving must-haves to interview-kit-builder so candidates are measured against what they were sold — an advert promising ownership and scope, followed by a loop testing only technical trivia, loses the exact people the advert worked on. Where the underlying role is not defined well enough to write about, that is hiring-manager-intake.

Part of the Claude Skills for TA and People Teams collection — open-source skills for in-house talent and people teams. Built and maintained by the team at MOVE.