A job posting attracts the right candidates when the ideal candidate is defined before the posting is written — not after. CPG Recruitment, founded in March 2020 by Christian Saab, works through 17 questions about the ideal candidate with employers before a single line of an advertisement is drafted. In one recent engagement, an employer who had been receiving unusable applications produced four strong candidates within a week of doing that exercise. The role, the salary and the job board were unchanged. Only the sequence changed.
Why do most job postings attract the wrong candidates?
Most job postings attract the wrong candidates because they describe a set of duties rather than a person. A posting functions as a filter. When the filter is built from phrases such as “fast-paced environment,” “team player” and “competitive compensation,” it describes almost every job in the market and therefore excludes almost nobody.
The consequence lands on the employer. Nobody self-selects out, so the entire screening burden shifts to the hiring team, and the strongest candidates — who are usually employed, selective and short on time — see nothing in the advertisement that distinguishes it from the other forty they scrolled past. This is the same underlying failure covered in why a job description isn’t enough to hire well.
What should an employer define before writing the job posting?
The person, in detail, before the duties. The 17 questions CPG Recruitment uses cover what the ideal candidate has done previously, what they are doing at present, what would realistically make them leave it, how they behave under pressure, who they will work alongside, what the first 90 days demand, and what strong performance looks like at the one-year mark.
Years of experience, credentials and software familiarity are not absent from the process, but they sit at the end of it. Employers who begin with those criteria consistently produce postings that read as interchangeable. A structured approach to this step is set out in how to build an ideal candidate profile.
What does a specific job posting contain that a generic one does not?
Observable detail that a candidate can measure themselves against. A specific posting states the real volume of work rather than calling the environment fast-paced, names the people the hire will work beside rather than asking for a team player, and describes what the previous person in the seat went on to do rather than promising growth opportunity.
Detail of that kind performs two jobs simultaneously. It attracts candidates whose working preferences genuinely match the role, and it repels those whose do not — before either party has spent time on an interview. Every application that never arrives because the posting was honest represents screening time the employer keeps.
Does a narrower job posting reduce the number of applicants?
Yes, and that is the intended outcome. Application volume and candidate quality are separate measurements, and employers routinely optimise for the wrong one.
Sixty applications containing three relevant people is a worse result than eleven applications containing six, because the first costs a week of review and the second costs an afternoon. Volume is a vanity metric in recruitment. The number that matters is how many people in the pipeline the employer would be pleased to hire.
How does a better job posting affect time-to-fill?
It shortens it materially. Defining the ideal candidate before publication is a significant part of how CPG Recruitment has reduced average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37 across client work spanning 25+ industries in Canada and the United States since 2020.
The mechanism is straightforward: interview slots stop being consumed by candidates who were never viable. Employers who feel behind schedule often respond by publishing faster, which reliably makes the process longer. The related cost analysis is covered in why a slow hiring process is costing you.
Who should approve the job posting before it goes live?
Every person who holds a vote on the final hire, and the approval should be given on the ideal candidate profile rather than on the wording of the advertisement. Sign-off on phrasing is cosmetic; sign-off on the definition is what prevents disagreement later.
Where a hiring manager and an operations lead have not agreed on the profile in advance, that disagreement does not disappear — it resurfaces at the offer stage, usually with a strong candidate waiting on a decision. The sequencing that prevents this is set out in what should happen before a job is posted.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a job posting be?
Most effective postings run between 300 and 600 words. Length matters less than specificity: a short posting naming real conditions outperforms a long one built from generic phrasing.
Should a job posting include a salary range?
In a growing number of jurisdictions it is a legal requirement, and elsewhere it remains good practice, because candidates increasingly decline to apply without one. Employers should confirm the rules that apply in the jurisdiction they are hiring in.
How often should a job posting be rewritten for a recurring role?
Every time the role is opened. The team, the tools and the expectations around a seat change between hires, so a reused posting describes a job that may no longer exist.
Should the same job posting be used on every job board?
The substance should stay identical across channels so candidates receive a consistent picture of the role. Formatting and length can be adapted to each platform, but the definition of the ideal candidate should not change from one board to another.
Working with CPG Recruitment
Employers who would rather not run this exercise alone can work through the ideal candidate profile and the resulting job posting with our team. Start with CPG Recruitment’s employer services, or review done-for-you recruitment if you want the full search handled. Christian Saab has also published a first-person account of the same problem on his personal site: why does your job posting attract the wrong applicants?.