How to Write an Effective Job Posting: A Guide for Startups

Job postings are one of those innocuous things that, when done wrong, can doom your startup.

That’s not entirely hyperbole.

In the early stages of growth, each new hire can have an outsized impact on your team. Your job posting won’t guarantee that your company scales beyond seven or eight figures, but it can dictate who gets into your front door and interviews with your team.

In this guide, I’ll share how to strategically write a job posting to attract and identify the right talent for your startup.

Before You Begin Writing Your Job Posting

An effective job posting doesn’t start with a template, a jazzy headline, or a pun. It starts with a clearly identified need from your company and an ideal candidate profile that fills that need.

This is especially important given the costs associated with hiring: each hire can cost your company $4,700, and many spend 3-4x that amount. That’s nearly $5,000 just to get someone through your door. Before you write a single line of your job posting, I recommend you run through the following steps:

• Perform a needs assessment
• Start with the ideal candidate in mind
• Write the job functions and required skills

I’ll walk you through each of these steps in detail.

Perform a Needs Assessment

Every hiring decision must start with a needs assessment.

This is sage advice for companies at any stage, but it’s especially critical for startups. When your company headcount is lower than 50, or even 100, each new hire can make an outsized impact on your success (or failure).

You can set each hiring decision up for success by performing a needs assessment in your company.

This starts with building a strong business case for the hire. You need to sit down with your leadership team to define what this hire will enable your company to do, help you achieve, and determine the impact of the role and how you will measure that impact.

Then, I find it helpful to break that impact down into two categories:

1. For capacity
2. For capability

Hiring for capacity means hiring to achieve or deliver more of what your current capacity enables. This works well when you have the pieces in place to execute on your roadmap and grow the company – you just need more pieces on the board.

Hiring for capability is more strategic. Hiring for capability means you are hiring specific individuals to fill a skill or knowledge gap in your company. Examples include hiring an engineer with experience in AI or LLMs, or a marketer who excels in our industry.

By determining what you need (capacity versus capability), you can then decide what type of hire you’re seeking and the impact you hope for them to make.

Start With the Ideal Hire in Mind

Before you begin writing a job posting, it’s important to start with the ideal hire in mind. Who are you trying to attract to your company? Just as importantly, who are you trying to filter out?

Much like a marketer or sales rep will create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to focus their efforts, I recommend that founders, HR professionals, and recruiters identify an Ideal Candidate Profile. This ensures that your recruitment process is focused on pinpointing the exact people you need to scale your company towards its goals while also providing a helpful yardstick to filter out candidates that may not be the right fit.

A recruiter’s ICP should contain the following:

• Culture fit: Will they contribute to and reinforce your company culture?
• Attitude: Do they have the right attitude to match your company culture, and are they willing and able to make an impact where necessary?
• Ability and skills: What skills do they bring to the table, and what impact will that have on your company?

Check out my guide to defining an ideal hire for a deeper dive into this.

Note the Job Responsibilities and Required Skills

Now that you have identified the need and the ideal candidate you are looking for, you can begin filling in the job functions and required skills.

For established roles in a larger company, this process can be routine. You know what other product managers, software engineers, or marketing managers do. You could simply copy and paste their job descriptions and find more candidates like them, but you can also interview people in similar or related roles inside your organization to develop a more complete and precise list of desired capabilities and attributes. For younger companies where one role could fill a few different needs, it’s important to map your job function and skills to your needs assessment.

For early-stage startups, each hire is a critical piece of your success, so don’t breeze through this process.

What to Include in Your Job Posting

You could log into Indeed or GlassDoor to post a simple job description with a list of responsibilities – but that would bring in just about anyone to your door, and you don’t want “just anyone.”

Your job posting should do three things:

1. Attract the right talent to your company
2. Help applicants self-select if they are a good fit
3. Give candidates a clear sense of the role and why they should want to work inside your organization.

Creating a job posting with this in mind gives you a more targeted applicant pool to interview and results in less wasted time for your team. Make sure to include the following key ingredients when writing a job posting for your startup:

• Introduce your company
• Summarize the role
• Define compensation, benefits, and location

I’ll walk you through each of these next.

Introduce Your Company

Start your job posting with a clear and engaging description of your company.

Smaller upstarts will try to cast themselves in the best possible light to attract candidates to their postings. I recommend using it as an opportunity to describe who you are — your values, strategic pillars, and your value proposition — in addition to who you are looking for.

Not everyone is cut out for a startup role. Even those who may not be the right culture fit for your company. Rather than devote word count toward generic descriptors like “fast-paced” and “agile,” use this to reflect your company’s culture and signal to culture-fits that you have a home for them.

To complement this, I recommend emphasizing what it’s actually like to work at your company. This paints a clear picture of life on the job and your company overall – and often, a better one than a generic company description.

It’s important to be transparent and authentic: include the good, the bad, and the ugly. While this level of vulnerability can be uncomfortable, it will go a long way toward attracting the right candidates.

Summarize the Role

Job postings will need the basics: a job title, description, and the key skills that make up a desired candidate. If you are hiring for capability, then it is especially important to ensure you’re bringing qualified applicants in who can hit the ground running and make an impact.

At a minimum, you will need to include:

• A brief job description
• A list of key responsibilities
• The skills required for the job, including any training or certifications
• Educational requirements, if applicable
• What does success look like? I find this is one of the best ways to explain the expectations of the job (and it deters the wrong people from applying).

Note: Many job postings will include lines like “5+ years of experience.” Frankly, I find this to be pointless. What matters more than the duration of experience is the quality of experience. I’d rather hire someone with three years of startup experience than someone with eight years of experience in a very different environment.

You may also want to include who the role reports to and where it sits in the organization. Compensation may need to be reported depending on the state (for what it’s worth, a Glassdoor survey shows 67% of applicants like to know the salary range upfront). Even in states that do not require compensation to be included, I recommend including a salary range to be as transparent as possible to potential applicants.

Benefits and Location

Finally, make sure to mention where the job is located (whether in-office, hybrid, or fully remote) and the benefits/perks your company offers.

Benefits can be useful for attracting top talent as well as complementing the salary you can offer. Building a sustainable benefits strategy is a topic for another post; for the purpose of this article, I’ll mention that you should include any and all applicable perks you offer, beyond free beer or snacks. 401(k) matches and healthcare plans may seem mundane, but they can make a big difference to an employee and be a determining factor in where they choose to work.

Those are the “key ingredients” to an effective job posting; read on for the mistakes to avoid.

4 Common Mistakes to Avoid

A job posting is nothing more than a brief description with a list of perks, right? How hard could it be?

If you want to write a targeted job posting that attracts the right talent to your startup to fill a need and make an impact, make sure to avoid the following common mistakes:

• Writing generic descriptions: Many startup job postings lack specificity about actual responsibilities and daily tasks. They use buzzwords like “rock star developer” or “ninja marketer” without clarifying what the role entails, making it difficult for qualified candidates to understand if they’re a good fit. This used to be the result of copying job descriptions from larger companies, but nowadays it’s due to companies using AI to whip up descriptions in seconds. The lack of accuracy and poor reflection of the company still applies.
• Poor communication of company culture: Many startups either completely omit information about their culture or present an idealized version that doesn’t reflect reality. Authentic communication about your work environment, challenges, and values helps attract candidates who will thrive in your specific culture.
• Bad alignment (or no alignment) with the team: Remember that hiring is a strategic function for your company; it’s not simply a matter of increasing headcount. Poor alignment on the team to assess needs and ensure those needs are reflected in the job posting leads to unqualified candidates, or worse, hiring the wrong people.
• Overemphasizing perks: While ping-pong tables and free snacks are nice, overemphasizing perks instead of focusing on meaningful work, growth opportunities, and the actual value proposition for candidates can attract people for the wrong reasons.

Steer clear of these mistakes, and your job posting will be set up for success.

Hiring is Just One Piece of HR: Download the Startup HR Survival Guide for the Rest

Hiring is a key piece of your startup’s success, but it’s only one element of HR.

The most successful startups know that their path to scaling from 7 to 9 figures will be made possible by the practices they follow to attract and retain top performers in their company.

I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide. In this free guide, you will learn:

• How HR can drive growth
• How to hire
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• And more!

Fill out the form below to download the free guide and put your company on the path to hypergrowth.