How to read a job description

A job description is rarely written by one person in one sitting. A hiring manager describes the work. A recruiter adds the things that make a shortlist easier to screen. Somebody in the legal or people team appends the paragraphs that have to be there. Then the whole thing is pasted over last year's version for the same team.

The result reads as a single list of demands, which it is not. Reading it as one is how a capable person decides they are under-qualified for a job they would have been offered.

Accountabilities

These describe what the person in the seat will own: what they will build, decide, run or improve, and who they will do it with. They are frequently in a section headed something like “What you'll do”, and they are frequently below the requirements — which is the wrong way round for a reader and a good reason to read that section first.

Accountabilities are the part of the posting that tells you whether you want the job. They are also the part a strong application answers.

Checkable specifics

These name a thing somebody could verify: a named tool or framework, a language, a domain, a qualification, a security clearance, a right to work in a place, a willingness to be in an office on certain days.

Useful test: could a stranger reading your CV say yes or no to this line without asking you a follow-up question? If yes, it is a specific and it counts. If it needs a conversation, it is a preference dressed as a requirement.

Boilerplate

Lines that could appear, unchanged, in a posting for a completely different role. Excellent communication skills. Comfortable with ambiguity. A passion for our mission. Detail-oriented self-starter.

None of this is checkable, so none of it screens anybody out. It is also, in practice, most of what people quote back at themselves when they decide not to apply.

Take the requirements section and sort every line into one of those three. Then look at what is left in the middle column — the checkable ones. That short list, together with the accountabilities, is the actual posting. Everything else is atmosphere.

Sorting the checkable lines into the ones that are genuinely gates and the ones that are preferences is a skill of its own: must-have versus nice-to-have job requirements is about the words employers use to signal the difference. Two patterns are worth knowing before you get there:

• A long requirements list is usually a weaker signal than a short one. Length often means several people added their own line; it rarely means all of them are gates.
• A years-of-experience figure is a proxy, not a fact about you. It is there to keep the screening pile manageable. Treat it as one of the checkable specifics — but the one most often waived when the accountabilities are clearly met.

Job titles are the least standardised thing in a posting. The same work is called three different things by three companies in the same city, and seniority words are applied inconsistently enough that they carry almost no information on their own.

Read the accountabilities, decide what the job is, and only then look at what it has been called. Searching by title alone is how good roles stay invisible, and it is why a tool that ranks on wording rather than on evidence keeps showing you the wrong things — why a percentage is not a decision is the longer version of that problem.

You should end with two short lists: what this person owns, and what a screener can check. Those two lists are what you compare yourself against, and they are what a tailored application answers.

From there the decision itself is quick — how to decide which jobs are worth applying for sets out the three outcomes, and how to check your CV against a job description is the comparison step in detail.