How to write an effective job description that attracts the right candidates
What you write in the job description is what you attract. Post a vague, recycled description and you get vague, recycled applicants.
This guide shows hiring managers, human resources leads and small-business owners in Idaho how to write a job description for a full-time professional role, whether it is a new position or a backfill, section by section, with a template you can copy. It is Step 1 of our guide to how to hire employees in Boise: define the role before you post it.
Nothing here is legal advice. Where the law touches this document, we point you to the agency that writes the rules.
What is a job description and why does it matter?
A job description (sometimes called a position description) is a written statement of the tasks, duties and responsibilities of the position, and it does three jobs at once: it tells candidates what it takes to perform the job duties, gives you a yardstick for screening, and records which duties are essential. A well-written description, finished before you post, makes every later step easier.
The description outlines the tasks, duties and responsibilities of a position (SHRM). The job posting is the shorter public version of that document, written to persuade the right people to apply.
The two are not the same thing, and many hiring problems start when an employer posts the internal document as the ad. The internal description can run two pages. The posting should not.
A written job description prepared before you advertise is treated by the EEOC as evidence of which functions of the job are essential (EEOC ADA guide). That matters later if a candidate or employee asks for a reasonable accommodation, and it is a good reason to write the description first and the ad second.
The job description can also anchor compensation decisions and classification decisions, which is why HR teams keep a signed copy in personnel files.
In our searches, the roles that fill fastest are the ones where the hiring manager can say in one sentence what the person will own. If you cannot write that sentence yet, you are not ready to post.
What should you include in a job description?
A complete job description has ten parts: job title, company profile, role snapshot, essential duties, required and preferred qualifications and skills, pay and benefits, location and schedule, the hiring process, and an equal opportunity statement. Use the template below and fill in every row.
Indeed’s employer guide lists five core sections: title, summary, responsibilities, qualifications, and salary and benefits (Indeed). We split those five into ten because the extra rows (location, process, equal opportunity) are where Idaho employers most often leave candidates guessing.
| Section | What to include | Example line |
|---|---|---|
| Job title | The title people search for, plus the level. No internal codes or clever names. | Staff Accountant |
| Company profile | Two or three sentences on what you do, where you are, and who provides supervision. | We are a growing engineering firm in Meridian. This role reports to the Controller. |
| Job summary | A role overview: one paragraph on what the person owns, any supervisory duties, and why the role exists. | You will own month-end close and keep our financials audit-ready as we grow. |
| Essential duties | Five to eight bullets, one responsibility each, starting with a verb and ordered by time spent. | Prepare monthly financial statements and reconcile all balance sheet accounts. |
| Required qualifications | Only what you would reject a candidate for lacking. | Bachelor’s degree in accounting, or equivalent general ledger experience. |
| Preferred qualifications | Your wish list, labeled as a wish list. | CPA certification or CPA candidate; experience with NetSuite. |
| Pay and benefits | A real range with a minimum and maximum, plus the benefits that cost you money. | $[low] to $[high] per year, plus health, dental, a 401(k) match and [X] days of paid time off. |
| Location and schedule | The work environment, working conditions, any physical demands, and the hours. | On site in Boise four days a week, with one remote day after the first quarter. |
| Hiring process | The steps, the number of interviews, and the timeline. | Phone screen, two interviews, and a decision within three weeks of applying. |
| Equal opportunity and accommodation | Your equal opportunity statement and how to request an accommodation to apply. | We are an equal opportunity employer. Email [address] to request an accommodation. |
Keep the essential duties list honest. If a duty takes an hour a month, it is not essential, and listing it as one weakens the document you may need to rely on later.
SHRM recommends closing the internal document with a disclaimer that other duties may be assigned, plus signature lines for the supervisor and employee (SHRM). Leave both off the public posting.
How do you write a job description step by step?
Write it in seven steps: start from the work, pick a searchable title, separate essential functions from nice-to-haves, set the pay range, cut it to a readable length, check the language, and tell candidates what happens next. Each step takes less than an hour.
Step 1: Start from the work, not the old posting
The worst thing you can do is dust off the description from the last time you filled this role and repost it. Roles drift, and the person who left was probably doing a different job by the end than the one they started in.
To understand the role, spend 20 minutes with the manager and, if you can, the person leaving. Ask what fills their week, what they would drop, and what a great new employee would do that the last one did not.
For a neutral list of tasks and duties, use O*NET OnLine, the Department of Labor’s occupational database, which holds thousands of occupation-specific task statements you can adapt. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook adds a plain-English description of what each occupation does, along with national median pay.
Step 2: Pick a title people search for
Candidates search by title, so a “Revenue Ninja” posting reaches nobody. Use clear, standard titles for the type of work and add the level: Staff Accountant, Senior Accountant, Accounting Manager.
If your internal title is unusual, keep it for the offer letter and use the market title in the posting, whether candidates are internal or external.
Step 3: Separate essential functions from nice-to-haves
The EEOC treats a written job description prepared before advertising as evidence of essential functions, so defining essential duties carefully matters: the list should hold only the duties the job cannot exist without (EEOC ADA guide). SHRM’s test is practical: how often is the task done, what happens if it is not done, and could it be reassigned (SHRM).
Put marginal functions and everything else under preferred. Every requirement you add that is not truly required shrinks your applicant pool. In our searches, the strongest candidates for a role are often the ones a rigid requirements list would have screened out.
If you need five years of React experience and will not budge, say so plainly. If you would take three years of experience and a strong portfolio, say that instead, because a blanket “5+ years required” line filters out people you would have been glad to bring on.
Step 4: Set the pay range before you write the posting
Start with the published number, then adjust for the local market. The BLS puts the national median for accountants and auditors at $83,680 a year as of May 2025, with about 115,300 openings a year projected through 2035 (BLS OOH, 2025).
Boise is not a national-average market. BLS published wages put the Boise metro about 7.5 percent below the US mean (BLS OEWS, 2026), while Ada County weekly wages rose 7.9 percent over the year to the first quarter of 2026, about twice the national 3.9 percent (BLS QCEW, 2026).
That gap between published data and the offers that close is why we wrote a separate guide to salary benchmarking in Idaho, with published versus market ranges by role. Use it to set the range, then put the range in the posting.
Step 5: Cut it to a length people will read
Candidates spend about 14 seconds deciding whether to apply (LinkedIn, 2019). Write the posting for that reader: a concise opener, scannable bullets, and the pay range near the top.
If the job has physical demands, such as lifting 50 pounds, list them only if the work truly requires them.
Keep the longer internal document on file and post the short version. The length section below has the numbers.
Step 6: Use inclusive language and check compliance
It is illegal to publish a job ad that shows a preference for, or discourages, applicants because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information, and the EEOC’s own example is an ad seeking “recent college graduates” (EEOC). “Digital native” and “young, energetic team” raise the same concern.
Wording shapes who applies in subtler ways too. LinkedIn found that men apply 13 percent more often than women after viewing the same job, and it points to masculine-coded words such as “aggressive” and “rock star” as part of the reason (LinkedIn, 2019).
Read the draft once for phrases you would not say to a candidate’s face, and once for jargon only insiders understand. Then have someone outside the team read it.
If you have a marketing team, run the posting past them before it goes live. It is a piece of your brand that more people will read than most of your marketing.
Step 7: Tell candidates what happens next
Say how many interviews there are, who they will meet, and when they will hear back. Then keep those promises.
Do not call a cover letter optional and then discard every application without one. If you want a work sample or a specific answer, ask for it in the posting, not as a surprise after they apply. How you treat applicants here is the start of candidate experience, and candidates talk.
Answer one more question in the posting: what does success look like in the first 90 days? It helps candidates picture the job, and it becomes the first page of your employee onboarding checklist once they start.
How long should a job description be?
Keep the public posting under 600 words, and shorter is better. LinkedIn’s analysis of about 4.5 million job posts found that postings of 1 to 300 words got candidates to apply more often than medium or long posts (LinkedIn, 2018).
LinkedIn analyzed roughly 4.5 million US and UK job posts from 2016 and 2017 and found that short posts of 1 to 300 words had significantly higher apply rates per view than medium (301 to 600 words) or long (601 or more) posts (LinkedIn, 2018). Those short posts converted 8.4 percent better than average (LinkedIn, 2019).
Length is a symptom, not the disease. Long postings are usually long because they carry the whole internal description, the full benefits handbook and three paragraphs of founder story.
Keep the internal document as long as it needs to be. Post the version a candidate can read on a phone in a minute.
Should you include the salary in a job description?
Yes. More than half of US postings on Indeed already show pay (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2024). Idaho does not require it, but a posting without a range now reads as one with something to hide.
When LinkedIn asked candidates what matters most in a job description, 61 percent said compensation, with qualifications and day-to-day details tied at 49 percent, and only 28 percent named company culture (LinkedIn, 2019). That is the reverse of how most postings are ordered.
By September 2024, 57.8 percent of US job postings on Indeed carried some pay information, up from 52.2 percent a year earlier, and states that require disclosure sit far higher, with New York at 97.7 percent (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2024).
Idaho does not appear on the list of states that require salary ranges in job postings, as of a tracker updated in July 2026 (GovDocs, 2026). This is not legal advice, and if you recruit remotely into states such as Washington or Colorado, check the rules there.
Whether or not the law requires it, a real range is the single change that most improves the quality of applicants, because people who would never accept the number stop applying and people who would start. A range whose top is double its bottom is not a range, it is a dodge, and candidates read it as one.
What does a finished job description look like?
Here is a sample job description: the template filled in for a Staff Accountant at a growing Boise company, with duties adapted from the BLS occupation profile. Swap in your own duties and numbers, but keep the shape.
Staff Accountant, Boise, Idaho (on site, full time)
[Company] is a [industry] business in Boise with a finance team of three. This role reports to the Controller and backfills a colleague moving into a senior role.
You will own the monthly close and keep our books audit-ready as we grow.
What you will do:
- Prepare monthly financial statements and reconcile all balance sheet accounts.
- Examine financial records to make sure they are accurate and comply with laws and regulations.
- Compute taxes owed, prepare returns and make sure filings go out on time.
- Review our accounting procedures for efficiency and document improvements.
- Support the annual audit and the budget process.
Skills and abilities required:
- Bachelor’s degree in accounting, or equivalent general ledger experience.
- Working knowledge of GAAP and a mid-market accounting system.
- Clear communication and practical problem-solving skills.
Nice to have: CPA or CPA candidate, NetSuite, and experience at a company with fewer than 100 people.
Pay and benefits: $[low] to $[high] a year based on experience, plus health, dental, a 401(k) match and [X] days of paid time off.
How we hire: a 20-minute phone call, one interview with the Controller, one with the team, and a decision within three weeks. Email [address] to request an accommodation at any stage.
The first three duties come from the BLS description of what accountants and auditors do (BLS OOH, 2025). A few short paragraphs, seven bullets and a real range, and the whole posting runs under 300 words.
What mistakes make a job description fail?
The five mistakes we see most in Idaho postings are reposting the old description, overselling the culture, a laundry list of requirements, a hidden or fake pay range, and a process that does not match the posting. Each one costs you the candidates you most wanted.
- Reposting the old description. The role has changed since you last filled it, and the old posting drew the applicants you were unhappy with last time.
- Overselling the culture. Do not advertise a flexible, remote-friendly workplace if the job needs someone at a desk four days a week. Be honest and you filter out the people who would leave in six months. Values do not need to be listed, but they should show in how the posting is written, and the posting should link to where they live on your site.
- The laundry list. Ten hard requirements for a mid-level role means almost nobody qualifies, and the people who apply anyway are the ones who ignore instructions. Keep required to the true minimum and move the rest to preferred.
- Hiding the pay. Covered above. If you are not sure of the number, that is a benchmarking problem, not a reason to leave the line blank.
- A process that does not match the posting. If the posting says two interviews, do not run five. If it says you will reply to every applicant, reply to every applicant.
The expensive version of these mistakes is the new employee who leaves in the first year, and we cover what that costs in the true cost of a bad hire.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Americans with Disabilities Act require a written job description?
No, but the EEOC treats a written description prepared before advertising or interviewing as evidence of which functions are essential (EEOC ADA guide). Writing it first protects you and makes accommodation decisions clearer.
What is the difference between a job description and a job posting?
The job description is the internal document that records duties, essential functions and reporting lines, and it often carries a disclaimer and signature lines (SHRM). The posting is the shorter public version, written to attract applicants.
Can a job posting ask for “recent graduates” or “digital natives”?
The EEOC’s own example of an ad that may violate the law is one seeking “recent college graduates”, because it can discourage people over 40 from applying (EEOC). Describe the skills you need instead of the age you picture, and the process stays equitable.
How often should you update job descriptions?
A good HR team reviews job descriptions every time the company fills the role, at each annual performance review, and after any promotion or transfer, because the job drifts as the person in it grows. If the description is more than two years old, rewrite it from the work instead of editing it.
Define the role before you post it
Writing an effective job description is Step 1 of hiring well, and it is the step that makes every later step shorter. If you want a second pair of eyes on a description before it goes live, or a search partner for the role, talk to RNG.
RNG places full-time, direct-hire professional and leadership roles across Idaho and the Mountain West. The fee is paid by the employer, and candidates never pay.
Filed under: Recruiting Process
