By the Live Assets Team, with insights from Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO
You wrote the job description. You posted it on three platforms. You waited. And what came back was either silence or a pile of applications from people who aren’t even close. Sound familiar? The problem might not be the market. It might be the job description itself.
Here’s something most employers don’t want to hear: your job description, the one you spent an afternoon writing, the one HR approved, the one that’s been sitting on your careers page for six weeks , is probably the reason your best candidates never applied.
Not because the role isn’t great. Not because your company isn’t worth working for. But because the way the opportunity is presented on paper is actively turning people away.
After more than two decades of placing IT professionals across North America, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times. A company has a genuinely excellent role. The team is strong. The growth potential is real. But the job description reads like it was written by committee — because it was. And the candidates who would thrive in that role? They read the first three lines and moved on.
Let’s talk about what’s going wrong – and more importantly, what to do about it.
The Real Cost of a Bad Job Description
This isn’t just about aesthetics or wordsmithing.
A poorly written IT job description has measurable consequences that hit your bottom line.
Research shows that over half of candidates say the quality of a job description directly influences whether they apply. When your posting misses the mark, you’re not just getting fewer applications, you’re getting the wrong ones. The people who apply to everything regardless will still show up. The senior developer who’d be perfect for your team? She read the first paragraph, didn’t see herself in it, and closed the tab.
The ripple effect is real. Your recruiter spends weeks screening candidates who aren’t the right fit. Your hiring manager does five interviews instead of two. The role stays open. The team absorbs the workload. Morale dips. And three months later, you’re back where you started, only now you’re more desperate and more willing to settle.
All because of a document most companies treat as an afterthought.
7 Job Description Mistakes That Push IT Talent Away
These are the patterns we see over and over again, across startups, mid-market firms, and enterprise organisations. If you recognise even two or three of these, your job description needs work.
1. The Wish List Disguised as a Job Description
You’ve seen it. Fifteen bullet points under “Requirements,” each one non-negotiable. Must have 7+ years of experience. Must know React, Angular, AND Vue. Must have AWS, Azure, AND GCP certifications. Must have led a team of 10+. Must have a master’s degree. Must be comfortable “wearing many hats.”
Here’s the problem: the person who checks every one of those boxes probably already has a title and compensation package that your role can’t match. And the person who checks 12 out of 15, the one who would actually be a phenomenal hire, sees that list and assumes they’re not qualified.
This is especially true for women and underrepresented candidates in tech, who are statistically less likely to apply unless they meet virtually every listed requirement. Your wish list isn’t raising the bar. It’s shrinking your candidate pool to almost nobody.
“When a client sends us a job description with 15 must-haves, the first thing we do is sit down with them and separate the genuine requirements from the nice-to-haves. Nine times out of ten, the real list is five items, not fifteen.”
— Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
The fix: Limit your must-haves to five or six. Be honest about what’s truly essential for day-one success versus what someone can learn in the first 90 days. Then list the nice-to-haves separately, and label them as such.
2. Zero Context About What the Work Actually Looks Like
A list of responsibilities without any narrative is like a recipe with only ingredients and no instructions. “Develop and maintain software applications.” Okay — but what kind? For whom? On what timeline? With what level of autonomy? Solving what problem?
Top IT professionals don’t just want to know what they’ll do. They want to know what it will feel like. Is this a greenfield project or legacy system maintenance? Will they be collaborating with a product team or working in isolation? Will they ship code weekly or quarterly?
Context is what turns a generic job posting into a story someone can see themselves in.
The fix: Describe what a typical week or first 90 days looks like. Name the projects they’ll contribute to. Be specific about who they’ll work with and what success looks like. If you can’t describe the work in human terms, you probably haven’t thought carefully enough about what you actually need.
3. Corporate Jargon That Says Nothing
“Dynamic, fast-paced environment.” “Passionate self-starter.” “Synergistic cross-functional collaboration.” “We’re like a family.”
Every single one of these phrases is a red flag to experienced IT professionals. Not because they’re offensive, because they’re meaningless. They tell the candidate nothing about your actual environment, and worse, they signal that you haven’t put real thought into describing it.
“Fast-paced environment” might mean exciting, innovative work. It might also mean understaffed and chaotic. Without context, experienced candidates will assume the worst.
The fix: Replace every cliché with a specific truth. Instead of “fast-paced environment,” say “We ship updates biweekly and our engineering team has full ownership of the release cycle.” Instead of “we’re like a family,” describe what your team actually does together — the Friday demos, the mentorship programme, the quarterly hackathons. Be real. The right candidates can smell authenticity — and they can smell its absence.
4. No Salary Transparency
This one is straightforward. Research indicates that four in ten candidates will lose interest in a role that doesn’t include a salary range. In a market where IT professionals are fielding multiple opportunities, omitting compensation isn’t “keeping your options open.” It’s giving candidates a reason to choose someone else’s listing over yours.
Beyond candidate behaviour, salary transparency signals trust. It says: we respect your time enough to be upfront about what this role pays. In a market full of bait-and-switch experiences, that goes a long way.
The fix: Post a salary range. Yes, a range, not a single number. If the range is genuinely competitive, it becomes a selling point. If it isn’t, you have a bigger problem than the job description.
5. Overselling the Dream
The flip side of jargon-stuffed listings is the job description that reads like a vacation brochure. “Join our rockstar team on a rocketship journey!” “Unlimited growth potential!” “The most exciting company you’ve never heard of!”
Experienced IT professionals have been burned before. They’ve accepted roles that promised the world and delivered a cramped office with a broken CI/CD pipeline. When everything in the job description is superlative, trust drops. And without trust, there’s no application.
The fix: Be honest about the challenges too. “We’re growing fast, which means some of our processes are still being built” is infinitely more credible than “Join the fastest-growing company in tech!” Authenticity attracts the candidates who will actually stay. Hype attracts the ones who will leave in four months.
6. Outdated Job Titles Nobody Searches For
Your internal title might be “Innovation Solutions Architect III” but no IT professional in the world is typing that into a job search. Research from Indeed shows that roughly a third of candidates use job titles as their primary search term. If your title doesn’t match what real people actually type, “Senior Software Engineer,” “DevOps Lead,” “Cloud Architect”, you’re invisible.
This extends to SEO as well. Job boards and Google index postings based on title and keyword relevance. A creative internal title might feel unique, but it’s costing you discoverability at the top of the funnel.
The fix: Use the title candidates are searching for, not your internal grade or a quirky brand name. You can explain the internal title and level during the interview process. Getting found comes first.
7. Writing for the Company, Not the Candidate
This is the most common mistake of all, and the most understandable. Job descriptions are usually written by the people doing the hiring, which means they naturally default to the company’s perspective: what we need, what we want, what we require.
But the candidate isn’t reading it from the company’s perspective. They’re reading it from theirs. And they’re asking one question: is this worth my time?
If every paragraph starts with “We need” or “You must” or “The ideal candidate will,” you’ve written a document that takes but never gives. The best job descriptions are a two-way conversation on paper — here’s what you’ll get, here’s what we need, here’s why this matters for both of us.
The fix: For every requirement you list, include something the candidate gets in return. Growth opportunity, interesting technical challenges, autonomy, mentorship, flexibility. The exchange should be obvious. The best IT professionals have options. Your job description needs to answer: why this one?
What Great IT Job Descriptions Actually Look Like
After reviewing thousands of job descriptions over two decades, we can tell you that the ones that attract exceptional candidates share a few things in common. They’re honest. They’re specific. They’re written in plain language. They make the candidate feel like a person, not an input.
They also tend to be shorter than you’d expect. Data from LinkedIn shows that shorter job posts, under 300 words, tend to outperform longer ones in application rates. That doesn’t mean you cut corners. It means you cut the filler.
And here’s something most companies miss entirely: the best IT professionals aren’t reading job descriptions at all. They’re not browsing job boards. They’re heads-down building things, solving problems, leading projects. If your entire hiring strategy depends on someone finding and reading your posting, you’ve already lost a significant portion of the talent pool.
“The IT professionals you actually want are rarely looking. Which means the job description isn’t the whole strategy — it’s one piece. The other pieces are relationships, reputation, and the ability to have a genuine conversation about what someone actually wants from their next role.”
— Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
Where a Recruiting Partner Changes Everything
This is where the difference between a volume recruiting firm and a relationship-driven partner becomes crystal clear.
A volume firm takes your job description as-is, blasts it across job boards, and sends you a stack of résumés. If the description is flawed, the results will be too, garbage in, garbage out.
A partner like Live Assets does something different. We start by asking questions most recruiters never think to ask. What’s the team dynamic? What communication style does the manager prefer? What does the growth path look like for this role? What happened with the last person in this position? What are the unwritten requirements that never make it into the posting?
Then we go to our network, the community of IT professionals we’ve built and maintained genuine relationships with for over 20 years. We don’t post and wait. We reach out directly to people we already know, people who trust us to bring them opportunities that are actually worth their time.
That’s the advantage of human-centric recruiting. It doesn’t start with a job description. It starts with understanding.
A Quick Checklist Before You Hit “Post”
Before you publish your next IT job description, run it through these questions:
i) Can a candidate understand what they’ll actually do in the first 90 days?
ii) Are your must-haves genuinely essential, or are some of them wish-list items?
iii) Is there a salary range included?
iv) Does the tone match your actual workplace, not the workplace you wish you had?
v) Would you apply for this role based on this description? Honestly?
vi) Is the title something a real person would search for?
vii) Does the description say what the candidate gets, not just what you need?
If you answered “no” to more than two of those, it’s worth a rewrite before you spend another dollar on job board fees.
The Bottom Line
Your job description is often the very first impression a candidate has of your company. For many IT professionals, it’s the only impression, because if it doesn’t land, they’re gone. No application. No interview. No chance to show them what you’ve actually built.
The good news is that this is fixable. And it doesn’t require a bigger budget or a fancier careers page. It requires honesty, specificity, and a willingness to write for the person you want to hire, not just the position you need to fill.
At Live Assets, we’ve spent over 20 years helping companies across North America get this right, not just the job description, but the entire approach to finding and keeping exceptional IT talent. Because we believe that when you treat people as living assets, the right ones show up. And they stay.
Building an IT team in Canada?
Whether you’re filling a critical gap or rethinking your hiring strategy, we can help you find the people who will actually move the needle. Let’s have a real conversation.
The Best IT Recruitment Agency in Canada | About Live Assets | IT Staffing Solutions
Live Assets is a boutique IT Staffing/Recruiting firm specializing exclusively in building IT teams of excellence for the Information Technology sector.
We are a small, but productive team that works closely together and has had a 96% success rate for the past number of years!
We have a diverse number of clients and industries and focus on both full-time and contract I.T. opportunities.
You can find out more about our company on LinkedIn
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