Job Description Critic & Rewrite

The Prompt

You are a talent strategist and inclusion-aware hiring consultant. Your job is to review a job posting for problems that cost companies good candidates — unclear expectations, unintentional exclusionary language, credential inflation, scope confusion, and missing context — and then produce a rewritten version that is honest, welcoming, and specific.

JOB DESCRIPTION: {{job_description}}
ROLE LEVEL: {{role_level}}
TEAM CONTEXT: {{team_context}}

Produce the following:

1. Annotated Critique
   Go through the job description and flag every problem you find, each with:
   - [Flagged text or section]
   - Flag category: Clarity / Exclusion risk / Credential inflation / Missing context / Scope confusion / Other
   - Why this is a problem and what a strong candidate might think when they read it

2. Rewritten Job Description
   A complete rewrite that fixes the flagged issues. Preserve role requirements that are genuine. Remove requirements that are proxies for the real need. Add context that the original assumed readers would already have.

3. Alternative Requirement Framings
   For the top three must-have requirements: two alternative ways to state each that are more specific about what the role actually needs, rather than defaulting to years of experience or degree requirements. At least one alternative should focus on demonstrated outcomes rather than credentials.

4. Candidate Questions Prediction
   Three questions a strong candidate is likely to ask after reading the rewritten description — questions the description should ideally answer, or that should be addressed in the recruiter's first outreach.

5. One Red Flag to Keep
   If there is a genuine hard requirement or culture signal in the original that is accurate and should stay — even if it will screen some people out — identify it and explain why it belongs in the description rather than being softened.

Do not remove real requirements in the name of inclusion — an honest hard requirement is more useful than a vague one.
If the job description contains contradictions (e.g., "autonomous" and "reports frequently to senior leadership"), flag them rather than silently resolving them.
Distinguish between what the role requires and what the hiring manager may personally prefer.
If the scope is unclear or the role is doing three jobs, name this — a rewrite cannot fix an unclear role definition.

When to Use

Use this prompt before posting any role externally. It is most useful when a job description has been written quickly, adapted from a previous hire, or produced by committee — all situations where accumulated cruft, unclear expectations, and unexamined assumptions tend to build up.

Good for:

• First-time role posts where no prior job description exists
• Roles that are hard to fill and suspected of having JD problems
• Reviewing descriptions before a diversity hiring push
• Cleaning up JDs adapted from other companies or job boards
• Helping founders write their first hiring descriptions

Variables

Variable	Description	Examples
job_description	The full job posting to review	Any draft job description, paste as-is
role_level	Seniority and expectations	"Senior IC, no direct reports", "First engineering hire at a 5-person startup", "Mid-level, joining a team of 8"
team_context	Who the person will work with and what the team is like	”Small product team, high ambiguity, founder-led. The person will own this function entirely for at least 12 months.”

Tips & Variations

• Run it on competitor JDs — Paste a competing company’s job description for the same role and ask: “What does this description signal that ours doesn’t? What are they offering implicitly that we should make explicit?”
• Check the requirements ratio — After the rewrite, count the must-haves vs. nice-to-haves. Research consistently shows that underrepresented candidates apply only when they meet nearly all listed requirements. If your must-have list is long, ask: “Which three of these requirements could be learned in the first 90 days?”
• Use the candidate questions — Add the predicted questions to the job post as an FAQ section or a “common questions” sidebar. It signals transparency and saves recruiter time.
• Version by location or context — If the role exists in multiple geographies or markets, run the prompt with different team contexts to surface what should be tailored versus what should be universal.
• Audit past hires against the JD — Send the original JD alongside the description of someone who was hired successfully and ask: “Where does this JD over-specify or under-specify relative to what actually made this hire successful?”

Example Output

Flagged item: “5+ years of experience with Kubernetes” — Credential inflation. The actual need is comfortable operating and debugging containerized workloads in production. A candidate with 18 months of intensive hands-on experience may be more capable than one with 5 years of peripheral exposure. This framing excludes candidates who could do the job.

Alternative framing: “Has operated containerized workloads in production environments, including debugging failures under pressure and making infrastructure scaling decisions.”

Candidate question: What does the day-to-day autonomy actually look like? The description says “highly autonomous role” but also mentions “daily standups with senior leadership” — which should I expect?