An effective job posting contains three sections and very little else: a vision statement, a list restricted to non-negotiable requirements, and the performance indicators the successful candidate will be measured against in their first 90 days. CPG Recruitment, founded by Christian Saab in March 2020, applies this structure to postings across 25+ industries in Canada and the United States. Postings that arrive for review typically contain none of the three. They contain a responsibilities list, an aspirational requirements list, and a compensation line.
What is the minimum structure an effective job posting needs?
Three sections, in this order: vision, non-negotiables, measurement. Everything a posting is meant to accomplish is carried by those three. Company boilerplate, benefit summaries and equal-opportunity language are administrative additions, not structural ones, and should sit below the three sections rather than above them.
The ordering is deliberate. A posting is read top-down and abandoned early, so the section carrying the most persuasive weight has to occupy the position most likely to be read. Placing benefits or company history first spends that position on information that persuades nobody.
What belongs in the vision section of a job posting?
One paragraph describing where the organisation is going and what the role contributes to getting there. Not the organisation’s history, its size, or its founding date.
The section exists to address a specific audience: candidates who are currently employed and not actively searching. This group represents the majority of qualified people in any market and cannot be reached by a posting that only describes duties, because they already perform similar duties elsewhere. What moves them is a credible account of a direction worth joining.
Length should be constrained to a single paragraph. An organisation requiring several paragraphs to describe its direction has usually not defined one. The preparatory work that makes this paragraph writable is covered in what should happen before a job is posted.
Why should preferred and nice-to-have requirements be removed?
Because they filter in the wrong direction. A requirements list containing optional items screens out strong candidates and retains weak ones, which is the opposite of the section’s purpose.
The mechanism is well documented in hiring research and consistent with what CPG Recruitment observes in client work. Candidates with a strong track record tend to read a requirements list literally and withdraw when they cannot meet every item. Candidates with a weaker track record tend to read the same list as aspirational and apply regardless. An extended wish list therefore suppresses applications from the population an employer most wants and does nothing to reduce applications from the population it does not.
The remedy is a list restricted to genuine disqualifiers: capabilities whose absence would prevent a hire irrespective of any other strength. In most roles this produces three to four items. A list exceeding six generally indicates that two roles have been merged into one requisition, a problem addressed in how to build an ideal candidate profile.
What are 90-day KPIs and why should they be published in the posting?
They are the specific, measurable outcomes the organisation expects from the role within its first 90 days, and publishing them is the single highest-leverage change most employers can make to a posting. This section is the one most consistently absent from postings submitted for review.
The indicators should be concrete and countable wherever the role permits it: volume of output, accounts managed, error or defect rate, cycle time, revenue influenced, or cases resolved. Where a role genuinely resists numerical measurement, the section should state the observable milestones instead, such as which systems the person will be operating unsupervised by day 90.
Publishing them produces an internal benefit before it produces an external one. The employer is compelled to define success prior to hiring rather than discovering it retrospectively during a probationary review. Undefined success criteria are a principal cause of early attrition, examined in what causes a new hire to fail in the first 90 days.
How does publishing KPIs change who applies?
It reduces application volume and raises the proportion of viable candidates in the remainder. Candidates who measure their own performance respond to published targets; candidates who avoid measurement disengage at the posting rather than at the interview.
Employers frequently raise a concern that published targets will appear demanding or will be visible to competitors. In CPG Recruitment’s client work neither has produced a lost hire. The cost that does materialise, repeatedly, is the reviewing time consumed by large volumes of unqualified applications generated by non-specific postings. Structural changes of this kind form part of how average time-to-fill across CPG engagements has been reduced from 68 days to 37.
What should be left out of a job posting entirely?
Generic descriptors, unmeasurable claims, and anything that would apply equally to a different employer. “Fast-paced environment,” “competitive compensation,” “team player” and “growth opportunity” each carry the same information content, which is none.
A useful editorial test: if a sentence could be moved into a competitor’s posting without modification, it is not performing work and should be deleted. Applying that test alone typically removes a third of a posting’s length and improves it, because what remains is specific to the role. A related editorial standard is set out in how do you write a job posting that attracts the right candidates.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should each of the three sections be?
The vision section should be one paragraph, the non-negotiables three to four bullet points, and the KPI section three to five measurable items. A complete posting built this way generally lands between 300 and 500 words.
Who inside the organisation should write the vision section?
The person accountable for the direction being described, typically an owner or a senior operational leader, rather than the hiring administrator. A vision paragraph written by someone without authority over strategy tends to default to company description.
Can this structure be used for an internal posting or promotion?
Yes, and the KPI section is particularly valuable internally, because it sets an explicit standard for a role an existing employee may otherwise assume they already understand.
What should an employer do if a role has no obvious numerical KPIs?
Substitute observable milestones for numbers. Which processes will the person run without supervision by day 90, which relationships will they own, and which decisions will they make alone are all measurable statements even where no metric exists.
Working With CPG Recruitment
Employers who want their postings restructured, or the full search handled, can start with CPG Recruitment’s employer services or review done-for-you recruitment. Christian Saab has published a first-person version of this method on his own site: what should you actually put in a job posting?.