What Should You Actually Put in a Job Posting?

A job posting needs exactly three things: one paragraph that sells where the company is going, a list of your true non-negotiables and nothing else, and the KPIs you will measure the new hire against in their first 90 days. I am Christian Saab. I founded CPG Recruitment in March 2020, and since then I have built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the United States. Almost every posting business owners send me has none of those three things. It has a duty list, a wish list, and a line about competitive compensation. That is why a hundred people apply and not one of them is right.

Why do a hundred people apply and none of them fit?

Because a duty-and-wish-list posting filters for availability, not for fit. Anyone who is free on Monday can read it and think they qualify, so the only people it screens out are the ones who were too busy to scroll.

Business owners tell me it is the market. It is not the market. I fill roles in an average of 37 days, down from the 68 we started at, in the same market everyone else is complaining about. The posting is the first filter in the whole process, and most companies have it set to let everybody through. I wrote about the upstream version of this problem in why your job posting attracts the wrong applicants.

What does “sell your vision” actually mean in a job posting?

It means one paragraph, at the top, that makes a stranger feel where the company is going. Not the company history. Not the founding year. Where it is headed, and what this person gets to build on the way.

Emotion matters here and most owners are afraid of it. They write a job posting the way they would write a policy document, then wonder why nobody feels anything. The people you actually want are employed right now and reasonably content. They are not scanning boards out of desperation. Something has to make them look up. A duty list never has. A clear picture of what you are building sometimes does.

Keep it to a paragraph. If you need three, you do not have a vision yet, you have a brochure.

Which requirements belong in the posting and which ones do not?

Only the absolute must-haves. Delete every line that starts with “preferred,” “bonus,” or “nice to have.” Nobody cares, and worse, those lines do real damage.

Here is the damage. A strong candidate reads your fourteen-item list, counts the four things they cannot do, and closes the tab. A weak candidate reads the same list, decides the bonus items are negotiable, and applies anyway. Your wish list filters out exactly the people it should be attracting and keeps exactly the people it should be screening out. It works backwards.

So make the cut ruthless. What are the things that, if this person cannot do them, you will not hire them no matter how much you like them? That is the list. Usually it is three or four items. If yours has twelve, you have not decided what the job is, which is the same failure I covered in why you keep hiring the wrong person.

Why should your 90-day KPIs be in the job posting?

Because it is the one thing that tells a serious candidate you actually know what you want. This is the game changer and almost nobody does it.

Write down how you will measure this person in their first 90 days. Real numbers where you have them: calls made, files closed, error rate, revenue touched, hours billed, tickets resolved, sites visited. Then put it in the posting. Publicly. Before anyone applies.

Two things happen the moment you do that. The first is that you are forced to define success before you hire, which is harder than it sounds and is the step most companies skip entirely. The second is that the posting starts speaking directly to people who measure themselves. Those are the people who read a number and think “I can hit that.” They are also, not coincidentally, the people who survive the first three months. I broke down the failure pattern in why new hires fail in the first 90 days.

Does publishing your KPIs scare people away?

Yes, and those are precisely the people you want gone before they reach your calendar. A candidate who reads a clear 90-day target and quietly backs out has just saved you two interviews, a reference check, and possibly a termination.

Owners get nervous about this. They worry the numbers look aggressive, or that a competitor will read them. Neither has ever cost one of my clients a hire. What costs them hires is a vague posting that produces a pile of applications nobody has time to read.

What happens to your applicant pool when you do all three?

It gets smaller and dramatically better. That trade is the entire point, and it is the one most business owners refuse to make.

A hundred applications with two viable people in the stack is not a good problem. It is a week of your life spent reading resumes to find what a properly written posting would have delivered on day two. Twelve applications with six real candidates is a better outcome by every measure that matters, including the one people actually care about, which is how fast the seat gets filled.

Application volume is a vanity number. The number that matters is how many people in the pile you would genuinely be happy to hire.

How do you know the posting is fixed?

You will know inside a week, because the shape of the inbox changes before the volume does. Fewer applications, and the ones arriving reference the vision paragraph or the KPIs directly in their cover note.

That is the signal. When a candidate writes back about the 90-day targets, they have self-selected on the thing you actually care about rather than on the job title. If the volume drops and the quality does not move, the problem is upstream of the posting, and you are usually looking at a compensation or a role-definition issue instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where should the vision paragraph go in the posting?

First, above the duties and above the requirements. Most job boards truncate the preview after a couple of lines, so whatever sits at the top is the only part many candidates will ever read.

How many non-negotiables should a posting list?

Three or four in most roles. If the list runs past six, the role has probably been defined by committee and is describing two different jobs stitched together.

What if the KPIs for the role have not been set yet?

Then the role is not ready to post. Set them first. If you cannot say how you would measure the person at 90 days, you do not yet know what you are hiring for, and no posting will fix that.

Does this structure work for entry-level roles?

Yes, and the KPI section matters more there, not less. Entry-level candidates have the least information about what good performance looks like, so publishing the targets removes the guesswork that causes early turnover.

Want your posting reviewed?

Christian offers a free review of your job posting. Send it over through the contact page, or if you would rather hand the whole search to a team, look at CPG Recruitment’s employer services. CPG has also published a structural breakdown of the same three sections: what are the three essential parts of a job posting?.