How to Write a Job Post and Interview Kit

Applications are not the goal. A post generating eighty applications of which two are qualified has created a week of screening work and one weak shortlist. A post generating twelve applications of which six are qualified is a better outcome by every measure that matters.

Written as a filter, the post does work you would otherwise do by hand. It should make unsuitable candidates self-select out — which means being specific about the parts of the job that are demanding, unglamorous or unusual.

Most posts do the opposite, describing an idealized version of the role. That maximizes applications and maximizes screening, which is exactly backwards for a business where the person screening is also the person doing the job.

Open with what the person will actually be doing, in concrete terms. Not "responsibilities include" but the real texture of the work.

A qualified candidate reads this to judge whether they can do the job and whether they want to. Both judgments are useful to you: the first filters capability, the second filters retention.

Concretely, that means:

• The actual tasks, with rough proportions. "About half your week is on site, a third quoting, the rest in the office."
• What success looks like at ninety days, stated plainly.
• Who they work with, and who they report to.
• The genuinely hard parts. Early starts, difficult customers, the weeks that get busy. Saying so filters correctly and, for the right candidate, reads as honesty rather than warning.

Separate them explicitly, and keep must-haves to four or fewer. A must-have is something where a candidate lacking it genuinely cannot do the job — a license, a certification, a legal requirement, a physical capability.

Everything else is a preference. Listing preferences as requirements has a well-documented asymmetric effect: candidates who meet most of the list still apply if they are confident, and candidates who meet most of the list do not apply if they are not. The filter you built removes precisely the people who would have been careful in the role.

The years-of-experience number deserves particular scrutiny. It is usually a proxy for competence that could be tested directly, and it excludes people who acquired the competence faster.

A range, in the post. Several states now require it, and beyond compliance it is simply the highest-leverage line in the document.

• It prevents wasted process. Four interviews ending in a number mismatch costs both sides real time.
• It signals confidence. Businesses that withhold pay are widely assumed to be paying below market, and the assumption is often right.
• It reduces negotiation asymmetry against experienced candidates, which is where small businesses usually lose.

If your range is below market, that is worth knowing now rather than after three rounds. It is a pricing problem in your own business, and it connects directly to whether your work is priced to support the wages you need to pay.

• "Fast-paced environment" — universally read as understaffed.
• "We're like a family" — read as poor boundaries and unpaid overtime.
• "Wear many hats" — read as an undefined role, which for a senior candidate is a genuine risk.
• "Rockstar", "ninja", "guru" — read as a business that has not thought about the role.
• "Competitive salary" — read as below market, because businesses paying well say so.

None of these is fatal individually. Together they describe a specific kind of employer, and experienced candidates recognize the pattern instantly.

Replace each with the specific truth. If the work genuinely is varied, describe the variety. If weeks genuinely get busy, say which weeks and how often.

Written before the first interview, not after. An interview improvised from a CV measures how well someone interviews, which is a different skill from the job unless you are hiring an interviewer.

The same questions, in the same order

Six to eight, asked of everyone. Consistency is what makes comparison possible — without it you are comparing impressions formed in different conversations.

Behavioral, not hypothetical

"Tell me about a time a job went wrong and what you did" produces evidence. "What would you do if a job went wrong" produces a plausible answer from anyone articulate.

A rubric, written in advance

For each question, what a weak, adequate and strong answer contains. Writing this before you meet anyone is what stops the criteria drifting toward whoever you happened to like — which is the single most common failure in small business hiring.

The single most predictive step available, and the most often skipped. Ask candidates to do a small piece of the actual job.

• An estimator prices a real job from real drawings.
• An office manager sorts a week of realistic invoices and flags problems.
• A technician diagnoses a fault from a described symptom.

Three rules keep it fair:

• Keep it short. Under an hour. Anything longer is unpaid labor and good candidates will decline.
• Use realistic but not live work. Asking candidates to do work you would otherwise pay for is exploitative and gets talked about.
• Score it against the rubric, same as everything else.

A work sample routinely inverts the ranking from interviews, which is precisely the point. Interviews measure fluency; samples measure the work.

Score everyone against the rubric before discussing them. Discussion first anchors the group on the first opinion voiced, which in a small business is usually the owner's.

Then write down why you chose who you chose, in three or four sentences. This does two things: it makes the reasoning explicit enough to check for bias, and it gives you something to review in six months when you know how the hire actually worked out.

That review is how hiring improves. Without a record of the reasoning, you cannot tell whether a good hire was good judgment or good luck, and both feel identical afterwards.

Reply to everyone who interviewed, including those you rejected. It costs ten minutes, it is the minimum decency, and in a small local market the reputational effect is real and long-lived.

Applications arrive and the temptation is to read every one properly. On a role attracting forty applications that is a day of work, and most of it is spent on candidates who were never going to make the shortlist.

Screen against the must-haves only

First pass, one question per application: do they have the four must-haves? Nothing else. This takes about ninety seconds each and removes most of the volume. Resist assessing quality on this pass — you are checking eligibility, not ranking.

Then a fifteen-minute phone screen

Three questions, identical for everyone who cleared the first pass:

• What are you looking for in your next role? Catches mismatches on the things that end employment early — travel, hours, autonomy, progression.
• What is your pay expectation? If you published a range this is a confirmation rather than a negotiation, which is exactly why publishing it helps.
• What is your availability? A candidate three months out may still be worth interviewing, but you want to know before scheduling around them.

Fifteen minutes on the phone eliminates the mismatches that would otherwise surface in a forty-five-minute interview, and it costs a fifth as much.

Front-loaded by design. The post and the kit are most of the work and they happen before you meet anyone, which is what makes the interviews fast and comparable.

Both are reusable. The second hire for a similar role costs a fraction of the first, provided you kept the kit — which most businesses do not, and so pay the full cost every time.

Deciding who to hire is irreducibly yours. So is knowing what the role actually needs, which no template supplies.

Turning that into a post written to filter rather than advertise, a consistent question set, a rubric, and a work sample is production work — and it lands precisely when you are already short-handed, which is why it is so often skipped in favour of a post copied from a competitor.