In nearly 20 years of tech recruiting, I have seen the same senior software engineer job description probably 150 times. Different companies, different industries, sometimes different cities. But structurally, word for word, the same document.
That’s because nobody actually wrote it. Someone found a template, maybe on Google, maybe from a colleague, downloaded it, changed the title at the top, and called it a day. Then the next company hired that person away, and they brought the template with them.
This is how hiring starts at most organizations: with a document that is a copy of a copy of a copy, describing a job that may or may not resemble the one that actually needs to be filled.
If you’re wondering why your hiring process keeps producing disappointing results, this is usually where the problem begins.
Needs discovery is the whole game
The most important skill that separates an elite recruiter from an average one has nothing to do with sourcing candidates or negotiating offers. It’s needs discovery: the ability to sit across from a hiring manager and actually figure out what they need, which is almost never what they say they need and definitely not what’s written in the job description they hand you.
When I was running recruiting teams, my standard practice was to take the job description a client gave me, set it aside, and then conduct what we called a job order intake call. This was a dedicated conversation, sometimes 45 minutes to an hour, specifically designed to understand the real shape of the role. Half of it was structured inquiry. Half of it was reading the room, listening to what wasn’t being said, and asking follow-up questions that the hiring manager usually hadn’t thought to answer because nobody had ever asked them.
Most hiring managers are experts on the technical requirements of the job they need filled. They know the tools, the stack, the certifications. Where they struggle is connecting those requirements to the broader context: where this person fits in the org, what success actually looks like at six months, what has failed in this role before and why, and what the team culture actually demands of someone day to day. Those answers live inside the hiring manager’s head, not in any job description, and a recruiter who doesn’t surface them is just casting into the dark.
What a job description actually has three sections for
When you break down what a job description is supposed to communicate, it really comes down to three distinct things.
The first is the day-to-day reality of the role: what does this person actually do when they show up to work? Not the aspirational version, the real version. Are they building from scratch or maintaining legacy systems? Are they working autonomously or constantly coordinating with other teams? The texture of the daily work matters enormously for finding someone who is going to stay.
The second is the skills matrix, and this is where most job descriptions go completely wrong. There is a meaningful difference between listing a tool and listing the actual capability that tool represents. A job posting that requires CRM experience might really be looking for someone with deep consultative selling skills. Or it might genuinely just need someone who can log call notes and run reports. Those are two entirely different people. Until you know which one you’re actually hiring for, you’ll keep attracting the wrong applicants and wondering why none of them feel quite right.
The third is the cultural and environmental fit: the preferences and soft expectations that shape whether someone thrives or leaves. Does this team communicate primarily through writing or through meetings? Is this a culture that rewards independent initiative or one that values alignment and process? These things rarely make it into job descriptions clearly because they require self-awareness that most organizations haven’t developed. But they are often the deciding factor in whether a hire works out.
The best way to gather all three is to go meet the team. When I was placing candidates at staffing firms, spending even a few hours at a client’s office, walking the floor, meeting two or three people on the team, watching how people interacted with each other, told me more than any document ever could. That is where 80 percent of a great recruiter’s matching instinct comes from.
The resume problem nobody wants to admit
Here is something that might make hiring managers uncomfortable: the data on resumes is brutal.
When I was running teams, we tracked outcomes carefully. What we found was that the candidates hiring managers initially wanted to reject performed identically in interviews to the ones they were excited about. There was no statistically meaningful difference in outcomes between a resume someone looked at and said yes to versus one they said no to. None.
Think about what that actually means. Someone worked for 15 years. Forty or fifty hours a week, thousands of hours of experience, dozens of relationships, real problems solved in real environments. And we give them one page, maybe two, to account for all of it. Then we make career-altering decisions based on whether those two pages match a keyword scan.
This is why I always pushed back when clients wanted to reject candidates based on resumes alone. The resume’s only job in the recruiting process is to answer one question: is this person in the ballpark? It is not a predictor of performance. It is not an accurate representation of someone’s capability. It is a blunt, outdated format trying to compress something multidimensional into a flat document. A recruiter who treats the resume as the product is going to keep making expensive mistakes.
Thirty minutes of real dialogue with someone will tell you more than ten pages of carefully formatted credentials.
— Sloane Barbour
What actually reveals a candidate is time and conversation. That has always been true. The challenge is that time is expensive and nobody has enough of it, which is exactly why the intake conversation on the front end is so critical. If you know what you’re actually looking for, you can move through candidates faster and more accurately.
AI just made the noise problem worse
There is a version of this problem that has gotten significantly worse in the last couple of years, and it is worth naming directly.
Right now, a large percentage of job descriptions are being written with AI. A hiring manager opens ChatGPT, types in a prompt, and 90 seconds later they have a job description that looks polished and professional and is functionally identical to what every other company in their space is posting. On the other side of that transaction, candidates are running their resumes through AI tools that optimize the document to match the job description, sometimes adding titles and skills they don’t actually have.
What you end up with is two AI-generated documents having a conversation with each other, neither of which accurately represents the actual human need or the actual human capability involved. The hiring team’s ATS filters resumes by keyword. The candidate’s AI matched their resume to those keywords. Everyone moves forward feeling like something productive happened, and then three months into the job, everyone is confused about why this person isn’t working out.
The job description and the resume, as we currently use them, are not solving the problem they’re supposed to solve. They are creating a layer of abstraction between companies and the people they actually need. And the louder the noise gets on both sides, the more critical it becomes to have a human being in the middle who knows how to cut through it.
What the product of a recruiter actually is
If you ask most people what a recruiter does, they will say something about sourcing candidates or screening applicants. That is not wrong, but it misses what the output of good recruiting actually is.
The product a recruiter delivers is a slate: five qualified candidates, all of whom are genuinely interested, all of whom will show up to the interview, all of whom represent real options for the hiring manager. Not 20 resumes. Not a database dump. Five people who have been properly vetted, who understand the opportunity, and who are ready to have a meaningful conversation about the role.
The data on this is consistent: a hiring manager who interviews five well-matched candidates has roughly an 85 percent chance of making a good hire. The bottleneck is almost never that the perfect candidate doesn’t exist. The bottleneck is that most hiring processes are designed to generate volume rather than signal, and the people running them are spending the majority of their time wading through noise instead of having the high-quality conversations that actually move things forward.
Getting to that slate of five requires doing the hard work on the front end that most people skip: the deep intake conversation, the real understanding of the role, the ability to look past a resume and recognize what someone actually brings to the table. That is what separates a recruiter who fills jobs from one who changes the trajectory of a team.
The right question to start with
Most companies open a role with a problem in mind, whether that’s a departure that left a gap, a growth phase that requires new capacity, or a net-new function they’ve never hired for before. But the question they usually ask is “who do we need?” when the question they should be asking first is “what does success look like and what kind of person actually achieves it here?”
Those are different questions, and the answers look different. One produces a job description. The other produces a hiring strategy.
The best hiring managers I’ve worked with over the years understood that a recruiter isn’t just a sourcing channel. They’re a thinking partner who can help translate a business problem into a people solution. That only works if the recruiter has done the discovery work to understand the business problem in the first place.
The companies that hire well consistently are almost never the ones with the most impressive job postings. They’re the ones with the clearest internal understanding of what they actually need, a recruiter who took the time to build that understanding with them, and a process designed around signal rather than volume.
Everything else is just a copy of a copy.
Written by
Sloane Barbour
Co-founder + CEO, engin
Sloane Barbour is co-founder and CEO of engin, an AI-powered recruiting platform built to bring real signal back to the hiring process. He has spent more than 20 years in tech recruiting and has been involved in over 10,000 hires.