Your Job Description Is the Same as Everyone Else’s. That’s Why Nobody’s Reading It.

I spend a lot of time reading job descriptions I’m not supposed to be reading.

I read them the way a copywriter reads a competitor’s ad. Looking for what they’re doing, what they’re not doing, and what they’re completely missing. And here’s what I find, over and over: the same post. The same bullet points. The same required degree nobody ever questioned. The same phrase “fast-paced environment,” which has appeared in so many job descriptions at this point that it has been drained of every particle of meaning it once had. When every listing looks like every other listing in the same category, something important happens. The people you most want to hire don’t read it. They scroll right past it. It’s invisible.

AI does the same thing. Generic content gets filtered out. Content that sounds like everything else in the category gets ignored. The algorithm doesn’t reward average. Neither do the best candidates. This is Broca’s area of our brains working as planned.

I’ve been a copywriter my whole career. I’ve spent decades studying how people make decisions, what makes them stop scrolling, what earns the next line. I’ve applied this to websites, to sales pages, to product launches. I have somehow spent less time applying it to job descriptions, which is where companies make their very first impression on the people they most want to work with. That changes now.

The Trigger Was a Conversation with Kelly Moreno

Kelly Moreno is the Chief Solutions Officer at Workforce Solutions Rural Capital Area, and she sits on the executive committee of the Round Rock Chamber alongside me. She joined me on Rock Solid this week. About twenty minutes in, she said something that I believe every employer and future employer needs to hear today.

“Look at your job descriptions. Do you really need that bachelor’s degree? Are the skill sets you’re requiring matching what the job actually is? If they’re not, let’s figure out why. Is it just inherited?”

Inherited. That’s the word that landed. That’s the friction. Most employers have never written their job descriptions. They found them, inherited them, or copied one from a template. The requirements on those descriptions are artifacts from whoever held the role before, or from whoever wrote the original posting years ago, and nobody has looked at them since. The degree that nobody needs is there because it was always there. The five years of experience for an entry-level role is there because someone pasted it in and moved on. The candidates who don’t meet those requirements don’t apply. Some of them would have been exceptional. They never got the chance to find out.

Kelly’s advice: put your job description through AI. Tell it what the job actually requires the person to do. Ask it to generate the skills that match. Then compare that list to what you’re currently asking for. Most employers will find a significant gap. The requirements they’re screening for don’t fully match the work they’re hiring someone to do. And that gap is a wall. A wall around your company that filters out exactly the people you didn’t mean to turn away.

A Job Description Is the First Chapter of Your Story

Here’s what I believe, as someone who has spent his career thinking about how words make people decide: a job description is not an HR form. It’s not a compliance document. It’s copy. It’s the first piece of writing a potential hire encounters from your company. It sets the tone for your culture before they ever walk through the door. And in most organizations, it reads like it was written by a committee in a hurry with a template and no intention.

The best candidates are choosing between options. They read your job description the same way your best customers read your website. They are looking for a reason to believe. They want to know: is this place interesting? Do these people seem like someone I’d want to work with? Does the way they describe this role tell me anything real about who they are?

Generic copy gives them nothing to grab onto. When a job description sounds like every other one in the category, the decision defaults to the easiest signal: salary, location, brand name. If you’re not the biggest name in the room, you lose that comparison immediately.

But when a job description tells a real story, something different happens. The right person reads it and recognizes themselves in it. They don’t just think about whether they’re qualified. They start to wonder whether they want to be part of what you’re building. That’s the difference between a candidate and a believer. And believers make entirely different employees than people who just needed a job.

What Copywriting a Job Description Actually Looks Like

I can show you exactly what I mean, because my wife Stacey and I own A Place At Home North Austin, a home care agency. Turnover in home care is brutal. Around 80% annually, industry-wide. I’ve applied my copywriting background directly to how we hire caregivers, because the stakes are real and the standard approach does not work.

Here is what we do, and why each step works.

We lead with purpose. Not the job title. Not the requirements. The impact. The first thing a caregiver reads from us is what the work actually does for another human being: how it helps a senior stay safely in their home, maintain their independence, keep their dignity. We speak to the caregiver’s heart before we mention a single logistics detail. This is not manipulation. It’s targeting. The caregivers who respond to that opening are exactly the ones who show up differently on day 90 than the ones who responded to a pay rate. Purpose selects for intrinsic motivation. And intrinsic motivation is what retention is actually made of.

We highlight the opportunity. Pay, schedule, pathway. We tell candidates what they earn today and where the role can go. The people who stay in caregiving long enough to become truly skilled want to know there’s somewhere to grow. If you hide that information or bury it in paragraph seven, you signal that you either haven’t thought about it or you’re hoping they won’t ask. Transparency in a job description is a trust signal. It says: we’ve thought about your experience here, not just ours.

We show the culture. How we treat people. What leadership actually believes about caregivers and the work they do. This is the last-mile element, the one that converts a “maybe” into an application. Anyone can describe their mission on a website. A job description that shows up with specific values, the way decisions get made, what a caregiver can expect when something goes wrong, that is a different level of honesty entirely. It separates you from every other agency running the same template posting.

Purpose. Opportunity. Culture. If you’ve spent any time with my work, you’ll recognize the underlying structure. It’s AIDAS applied to hiring. You earn attention with purpose. You build interest with opportunity. You create desire through culture. The application is the action. The same architecture that converts a website visitor converts a job seeker. Because the psychology is the same. People need to feel something before they can decide. Give them a reason to see themselves in your story before you ask them to commit to it.

We were about 90% there. Then the Round Rock Chamber put on an event about recruiting and retaining talent. I sat in the room, listened, and came home and made a few specific tweaks. Not a full rewrite. Targeted improvements to the places where we were close but not quite landing. That’s usually how it works. The story is mostly already there. You just have to find it and sharpen it.

The framework doesn’t change whether you’re hiring caregivers or engineers or account managers or copywriters. What changes is the persona and what they care about. A caregiver’s heart responds to a different kind of purpose statement than a developer’s. The opportunity they want to hear about looks different. The culture signals that build trust are different. But the sequence is the same. And the mistake that most companies make is also the same: they write to the job, not to the person. They describe the role, not the story someone would be joining.

The Degree Requirement Is a Friction Problem

I’ve spent most of my career thinking about friction. The places in a buyer’s journey where something unnecessary stands between them and the action you want them to take. A confusing checkout page. A form with too many fields. A headline that doesn’t answer “what’s in it for me?” fast enough. Friction kills conversion. Remove the unnecessary friction and more of the right people get through.

A degree requirement nobody ever questioned is friction. It’s a gate in front of your application that you installed without meaning to, and it’s filtering out people who would do the job well. Kelly put it directly: look at whether the skills you’re requiring match what the job actually is. If they don’t match, the requirement is friction. Unnecessary friction in a hiring funnel works exactly the same as unnecessary friction in a sales funnel. Fewer people get through, and not always the right fewer.

I’m not saying credentials don’t matter. Some roles require specific training. But there’s a significant difference between a requirement that reflects what the job genuinely demands and a requirement that’s there because nobody ever removed it. The first is a filter. The second is a wall. One is intentional. One is inherited. You should know which one you have.

Find Your Core Story

Pull up your most recent job posting. Read the first three lines cold, as if you’ve never heard of your company. Ask one question: what’s the story someone would be joining if they took this job?

If the answer isn’t in those first three lines, it needs to be. Not buried in bullet seven. Not in the “about us” paragraph at the bottom that nobody reads. The story is the hook. It’s what separates the people who apply because they want to work there from the people who apply because they need a job. Those two groups perform differently from day one. They stay differently. They talk about the company differently to other people who might apply.

You don’t have to burn your current description down to find it. You might be closer than you think. Sit in on a conversation about hiring in your industry. Talk to someone who joined you and stayed. Ask them what they tell people when they describe working there. That’s your story. It’s already being told somewhere. The job description just isn’t telling it yet.

The right person for your next open role is reading job descriptions right now. If yours sounds like everyone else’s, they’re already gone.

Listen to the Full Conversation

Kelly Moreno covered a lot more ground than job descriptions in our conversation on Rock Solid. She talked about the free upskill grants available to Round Rock employers, the apprenticeship model WSRCA built for the manufacturing shift Samsung and Tesla triggered, and the vocational rehab placement program that can put a trained worker in your office at literally zero cost. If you own or run a business in Williamson County or anywhere in the nine counties WSRCA covers, this episode is directly useful to you. Catch the full episode here, or watch it below. And you can connect with Kelly on LinkedIn or reach her team at workforcesolutionsrca.com.