The Best Job Posting I’ve Ever Read

I just stumbled on the best job req I have read in a long time, and it was not even for a design or product role. It was ClickUp’s Chief of Staff posting , and it did what almost none of us do. It named exactly what the person would own, in plain committing language. It was just as clear about what it wanted them to have already done. It said what success looked like a year in, and who should not apply. One line, stated outright: clarity is a deliverable, not a nice-to-have. The ClickUp posting is intense, almost aggressively so, but no one could accuse it of hiding the job. It is signed by ClickUp's CEO. The sharpest reqs come from whoever owns what the role has to produce, and that ownership is often the first thing most companies hand off. And most of what these postings demand is hard skills, which are exactly what Claude and ChatGPT now make quick to learn. So the edge moves to what no bullet can measure: how fast someone learns, and whether they ask the right question. The list now screens for who already has the skill, and steps right past the person who could learn it in a month. The cookie-cutter is finished, twenty identical bullets stamped on every role. I think this is where job postings are headed: hyper-specific about the work and wide open about the person, both at once.

Those two tasks pull in opposite directions. Name the work precisely enough that the right person reads it and thinks, that is me. And keep the door wide enough that you do not screen out the person who could do it best but does not match the résumé you had in your head. A thin job req gets both backwards: vague about the work, then gated behind a wish list of years and credentials. Be specific about the work, and open about the worker.

The instinct is to fix a thin job req by adding words, and it is the wrong lever. Any copywriter will tell you the short version is harder to write and better to read. Reaching for more words is what you do when the thinking underneath is not finished.

Start with what the person will own, and say it in verbs your organization would be willing to be measured against. Lead, hire, ship, decide, review. The right candidate can picture the week, and so can you: you cannot hold someone to a responsibility you never named. Rho’s VP of Product job req gives two of its responsibilities as remove friction and raise the clock speed. Linear asks a designer to fix the paper cuts you find while using the product, with no hand-offs. The weak job reqs reach for verbs that sound like leadership and commit to nothing: champion, evangelize, operationalize, standardize, govern, spearhead. If you cannot describe the job without them, you have not decided it yet.

The swap is easy to feel. Here are five verbs pulled from real postings, each in front of the responsibility it dresses up.

A plain verb is a promise you are willing to be held to. Hire means you will judge this person on who they bring in. Ship means there will be a thing, on a date, with their name on it. A performance verb holds no one to anything. One VP of Design and User Experience posting buries the word clarity inside the sentence reduce ambiguity and rework by establishing clear accountability models and scalable design governance practices. A sentence that cannot clarify its way out of itself. Say the work plainly and you have done the first honest thing a leader can do for a role.

The second task is where good intentions can harden into a filter. You owe the person a real bar: what would actually make someone able to do this. A number, a domain, an outcome they have driven, written so a strong candidate can measure themselves against it and sometimes come up short. What you do not owe anyone is a wall. The easy move is a long list of bullets, and this is where you might lose your best people. One Director of Product posting stacks twenty-four requirement bullets, from twelve years in the domain down to proficiency in Microsoft Office and show an ownership mindset. One simple test for every bullet: could a great candidate fall short of it and still do the job well? If yes, it is a preference, not a requirement, and it belongs out of the must-haves.

Even careful companies miss one of the two. One posting spells out what it wants the person to have done, and never once says what they would do. Another does the reverse: four plain lines of responsibility, then a bar that reads you like working hard, you are honest. You need both, in proportion: specific on the work, generous on the pedigree.

There is a newer pressure making this even harder. The list of what a senior leader must be keeps growing: set direction, build the team, manage up, present to the board, and now be a hands-on builder fluent in AI, an expectation that went from nice-to-have to non-negotiable about as fast as the models themselves. You cannot honestly ask for all of it in equal measure. So stop pretending the list is flat. Rank it. Put the two or three things the role actually turns on at the top, and say roughly how much they weigh: this is most of the job, this is the next slice. A ranked job req tells the person what the role rests on and what they will be judged on first. A flat list of equal must-haves asks for perfection; a ranked one tells them where to aim.

Ranking the list is one move; the boldest goes further and replaces the screen with the work itself. Jen Ayala, who runs recruiting at Clay, dropped the résumé screen for a high-volume role and gave candidates a project that opens, here is what the job actually looks like, try it on. Her point is that we burn most of our energy filtering people out before we ever see what they can do, and the ones worth hiring often spike in a single dimension instead of matching every box. You can only make that offer once you have named the work. The clearer you are about the work, the less you need to gate on the person. ClickUp does exactly this, asking for no résumé and no cover letter, only two short videos: show us how you created leverage for a leader with AI, and how you reinvented a workflow from first principles. Most applications ask the other way. A résumé, a LinkedIn, a portfolio, a personal site: one story told four times, which the candidate stitches together and the hiring manager has to reconcile before the work shows through. Two videos ask for it once, in the candidate’s own voice. ClickUp can ask this because it already made the work clear.

A few companies have built a reputation on postings worth reading, and they give each job its own room. 37signals splits every posting into About the Job and About You, and fills the second with a short literal list of skills instead of a wish. The strongest name the friction out loud. Vercel’s posting corrects its own job board and tells you the remote role carries three required office days. Oxide publishes a flat number and asks you to read its internal design documents before you apply. Telling people what is hard is the same act as choosing a plain verb. Someone decided, and was willing to say so.

Before you post your next job req, read it as the person you are trying to win, then do three things:

You build the business on the people you bring in, and you find the right ones only when both sides can see the shape of the role: what it has to move for the business, and how it moves the person who takes it. In my experience, the companies with the best employee experience build the best products, and the posting is where that experience begins. So shaping a job req is really service design: the first touchpoint of a company someone is deciding whether to join, made with care or shipped on autopilot. It is the first act of leadership on the role, and the best person can tell, from the first thing you ever send them, whether you did it.