Job Posting ExamplesFive copy-ready samples and the structure behind them
Most job postings read like a legal document that lost an argument with a marketing brief. Below are five complete samples you can lift and edit, covering engineering, sales, hourly work, healthcare, and support. Each one follows the same seven-block structure, and I have explained what each is doing and why.
Seven blocks. Nothing else earns its place.
Job title
Searchable, no internal jargon
Two-line summary
What they do, why it matters
Responsibilities
5 to 8 concrete outcomes
Requirements
Only true dealbreakers
Pay range
Required in 6+ states
Location and schedule
Onsite, hybrid, shift times
How to apply
Steps and timeline
Everything else belongs on your careers page, not in the posting.
A job posting is an advertisement. That sounds obvious until you read one. The average posting opens with two paragraphs about company values, buries the actual work under a heading called Key Responsibilities, and finishes with a requirements list so long that half the qualified market quietly closes the tab. Then the hiring manager complains that nobody good applies.
The fix is boring and it works. Say what the person will do. Say what you will pay. Say where the job is and how to apply. Everything else is decoration. If you want the deeper version of this argument, the difference between the internal document and the public ad is covered in job description vs job posting, and the drafting mechanics live in how to write job descriptions.
One more thing before the samples. The EEOC treats job advertisements as covered conduct. Language that signals a preference based on age, sex, religion, national origin, or disability is a problem in a posting, not only in an interview. Phrases like recent graduate and digital native show up in postings constantly and both point straight at age.
The structure
What every posting below has in common
The title is the single most important line in the document and most teams treat it as an afterthought. Job boards match on it. Google indexes it. Candidates scan it. If your internal title is Member of Technical Staff III, post Backend Engineer and keep the internal title for the offer letter.
The summary is two sentences, maximum. What the person does, and why the role exists right now. Roles that exist for a visible reason attract better applicants than roles that seem to exist because a box on an org chart is empty.
Responsibilities should read as outcomes, not verbs in a vacuum. Manage stakeholder relationships tells a candidate nothing. Run the weekly forecast call with four regional sales leaders tells them exactly what Tuesday looks like.
Example 1
Software engineer at a small remote team
Engineering candidates read postings with unusual suspicion, because so many of them are written by someone who has never opened the codebase. Specificity is the whole game here. Name the stack, name the team size, name what breaks.
Backend Engineer (Python), Remote, US time zones
We are a 14-person team building billing infrastructure for healthcare clinics. You will be our fourth backend engineer, owning the payments service that processes about $40M in annual claims. The person in this seat before you moved to our platform team, so the handover is real and the documentation exists.
What you will do
- ●Own the payments service end to end, from schema design through on-call
- ●Cut our claims reconciliation job from 40 minutes to under 5
- ●Design and ship two or three meaningful features per quarter with a product partner
- ●Review pull requests from the two engineers who joined this year
- ●Take one week of on-call every four weeks, roughly one page per rotation
What we need
- ●Four or more years writing production Python, ideally with Django or FastAPI
- ●You have designed a Postgres schema that survived contact with real traffic
- ●Comfortable owning something in production, not just contributing to it
- ●Clear written communication, because we are distributed across six time zones
Pay, location, and process
- ●$145,000 to $175,000 plus equity, depending on level
- ●Remote within US time zones, two onsite weeks per year in Austin
- ●Process: 30-minute call, 90-minute technical pairing session on our real codebase, team conversation, offer
- ●We reply to every applicant within five business days
Notice what is missing. No mission statement. No we work hard and play hard. The dollar figure attached to the service tells a candidate the stakes, and the note about the previous engineer moving internally quietly answers the question every good engineer is actually asking, which is whether this role is a trap.
Example 2
Sales development representative
SDR postings fail in a specific way: they hide the activity numbers. Candidates find out about the 60-dial daily minimum in week two and quit in month three. Put the numbers in the ad. You will get fewer applicants and dramatically better retention.
Sales Development Representative, Chicago, Hybrid
You will be the first conversation prospects have with us. We sell scheduling software to mid-market logistics companies, deal sizes run $30K to $80K, and our SDR team of five books roughly 90 qualified meetings a month between them.
What the week looks like
- ●Around 50 outbound touches a day across email, phone, and LinkedIn
- ●Book 12 to 15 qualified meetings per month, which is where quota sits after ramp
- ●Research accounts using our target list, not a cold list you build from scratch
- ●Sit in on two closing calls a week so you learn what a real deal sounds like
What we need
- ●One year in a quota-carrying or customer-facing role, or a track record that shows you can handle repetition
- ●You can take a no on the phone and dial again in the same minute
- ●Written English good enough that we are not rewriting your emails
Pay, location, and process
- ●$55,000 base plus $25,000 on-target commission, uncapped
- ●Chicago, three days a week in our River North office
- ●Promotion to Account Executive typically happens between month 14 and month 20; four of our seven AEs started here
- ●Process: recruiter call, role play with the SDR manager, team conversation, offer within two weeks
The promotion data is the strongest line in that posting. Four of seven is a verifiable claim, and verifiable claims are what separate a real employer brand from a slide deck. More on that in our guide to employer branding that survives contact with candidates.
Example 3
Hourly role: line cook
Hourly postings should be short. The candidate is on a phone, probably between shifts, comparing you against four other kitchens. Wage, hours, and location decide it. Everything else is noise, and a 600-word posting for a line cook role reads as a red flag about how the kitchen is run.
Line Cook, $22 to $26/hr, Portland, OR
Neighborhood restaurant, 70 seats, scratch kitchen, 120 to 160 covers on a Friday. We are hiring one line cook for the saute station. Our current team has been together 18 months, which in this industry says most of what you need to know.
The job
- ●Saute station, dinner service Wednesday through Sunday, 3pm to 11pm
- ●Prep from 3pm to 5pm, service 5pm to 10pm, close and clean until 11pm
- ●Two consecutive days off, Monday and Tuesday, every week
Pay and benefits
- ●$22 to $26 per hour depending on experience, plus tip pool averaging $3 to $4 per hour
- ●Health insurance after 60 days, employer covers 70%
- ●One free staff meal per shift and 40% off on your days off
How to apply
- ●Text or call Marcus at the number on our careers page, or apply online in about two minutes
- ●We do a 20-minute conversation and a paid two-hour stage, then decide the same week
That posting is under 200 words and answers every question a cook has before applying. The paid stage matters too. Unpaid trial shifts are common in restaurants and they are a wage and hour risk, so paying for the stage is both fairer and safer.
Line edits
The five phrases doing the most damage
You can improve most existing postings in ten minutes by finding these phrases and replacing them with something a candidate could actually picture.
The same information, written twice
Rockstar ninja developer wanted
Backend Engineer (Python, Django)
Nobody searches for ninja
Must be a team player with strong communication skills
You will write the release notes our support team sends to 4,000 customers
Turns a trait into a task
Competitive salary
$78,000 to $94,000 plus 10% target bonus
Competitive means nothing
Fast-paced startup environment
You will own two projects at a time and ship every two weeks
Sets an honest expectation
Other duties as assigned
Roughly 20% of the week goes to unplanned customer escalations
Names the messy part
Publish the posting, then let the pipeline run itself
Prepzo turns a job posting into a branded careers page, distributes it to the boards that matter, and screens the applicants before your team opens a single resume.
Try Prepzo freeExample 4
Healthcare: registered nurse
Clinical candidates are evaluating one thing above all others, and it is staffing ratios. A nurse posting that does not name the ratio is telling them something, and it is not good. Sign-on bonuses get attention, but ratios and schedule predictability are what stop someone leaving in eight months.
Registered Nurse, Med-Surg, Nights, Raleigh NC
Our 32-bed medical surgical unit is hiring two night shift RNs. Typical ratio is one nurse to five patients, and we staff a charge nurse who does not carry an assignment plus two CNAs on every night shift.
Schedule and unit
- ●Three 12-hour shifts per week, 7pm to 7am, self-scheduled six weeks out
- ●Every third weekend, and we hold to that
- ●One to five ratio, occasionally one to six during winter census peaks
- ●Epic is our EHR; we give six weeks of orientation with a dedicated preceptor
Requirements
- ●Active NC RN license or eNLC multistate license
- ●BLS certification; ACLS within 6 months of hire, paid by us
- ●One year of acute care experience, or new graduate with a med-surg clinical rotation
Pay and benefits
- ●$34 to $46 per hour based on years of experience, plus $6 night differential and $4 weekend differential
- ●$8,000 sign-on bonus paid in two installments at 6 and 18 months
- ●Tuition support up to $5,250 per year toward BSN or MSN
Example 5
Entry level: customer support associate
Entry level postings attract enormous volume, so the requirements section is doing triage work. Resist the urge to add a degree requirement you do not enforce. It filters out good people and it does not filter out anyone you actually wanted to reject.
Customer Support Associate, Remote US, No experience required
You will answer questions from small business owners using our invoicing software. Around 70% of the work is email and chat, 30% is phone. We handle about 900 conversations a week across a team of six, and the most common question is still how to void an invoice.
What you will do
- ●Handle 35 to 45 conversations per day once you are ramped, which takes about six weeks
- ●Escalate billing disputes to our finance partner using a written template
- ●Flag recurring bugs to engineering; last quarter support-reported issues drove four product fixes
- ●Work a rotating Saturday roughly once every six weeks, with a weekday off in exchange
What we need
- ●You can write a clear, friendly paragraph without a template
- ●Reliable home internet and a quiet space for phone calls
- ●That is the list. No degree, no prior support experience.
Pay and process
- ●$21 per hour, reviewed at six months, with a $2 increase for anyone who reaches Tier 2
- ●Remote anywhere in the US, equipment provided
- ●Process: short written exercise, 30-minute video call, offer. Usually done in eight days.
The written exercise before the call is deliberate. For a role that is mostly writing, a 15-minute sample predicts performance better than a conversation does, which is the same logic behind structured interviews. Volume roles like this one also make a strong case for automated first-pass review, since 900 applications is not a human-scale reading task. Our guide to screening resumes without losing good candidates covers how to do that without turning it into a keyword lottery.
The legal floor
Pay ranges are no longer optional in much of the country
Colorado started this in 2021. California and Washington followed in 2023, New York State in September 2023, Hawaii in 2024, and Illinois in January 2025 for employers with 15 or more employees. If you hire remotely across the US, assume at least one of these applies to any given posting, because most of these laws reach roles that could be performed in the state.
The compliance argument is the boring reason to post a range. The practical reason is better: a published range ends the salary conversation before it starts wasting interview slots. I have watched teams run four rounds with a finalist and discover a $40,000 gap at the offer stage. That is a fully preventable failure, and the prevention is one line of text.
If your ranges are not defined yet, that is the real project. Start with salary banding and read our take on pay transparency in hiring before you publish anything you cannot defend internally.
Before you publish
A six-point check that takes two minutes
None of these are clever. They are just the things teams skip when a hiring manager wants the role live by Friday.
Run every posting through this before it goes live
Title matches what candidates type into search
Biggest single lever
Pay range published
Legally required in 6+ states
Requirements list is 7 items or fewer
Widens the pool
Location and schedule stated plainly
Kills the top FAQ
Application takes under 5 minutes
Where most drop-off happens
Timeline for next steps included
Cheapest trust signal you have
The one that quietly costs you the most
Application length. A posting can be excellent and still convert badly if the form asks candidates to upload a resume and then retype the same employment history into eleven fields. If your application takes more than five minutes for an hourly role, the copy is not your problem.
Distribution
A good posting on the wrong board is still a dead posting
Write once, syndicate everywhere, and let the results tell you where to spend. For most small teams the honest ranking looks like this: your own careers page first, because it converts referrals and repeat visitors at rates no board matches. Then Indeed for volume. Then LinkedIn for anything above entry level. Then one niche board that actually serves your role.
Budget matters here. Sponsored posts on the big boards get expensive fast, and the arithmetic changes a lot depending on the role. We broke the numbers down in what Indeed actually costs employers and LinkedIn job posting cost. If the budget is zero this month, start with free job posting sites and niche job boards.
One technical note that gets ignored: mark up your careers page with Google's JobPosting structured data. It is what puts your role into Google's job search results, it is free, and most small employers never do it. Prepzo's job board distribution handles the markup and the syndication together.
What I would change first
If you only fix one thing this week, fix your titles. It is the cheapest change with the biggest effect on how many people ever see the posting, and clever internal titles are costing companies applicants every single day.
Second, add the pay range. Third, cut the requirements list in half. Those three edits take about twenty minutes across an entire job board and they will move your application volume more than any sourcing campaign you run this quarter.
The samples above are meant to be edited, not admired. Copy the one closest to your role, replace the specifics with your own, and delete anything you cannot back up with a number.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a job posting be?
Between 300 and 700 words for most roles. Under 300 and candidates cannot tell what the job actually involves. Over 700 and you are writing an internal document, not an advertisement. Hourly and high-volume roles work best at the short end of that range.
What is the difference between a job posting and a job description?
A job description is an internal HR document covering duties, reporting lines, and classification. A job posting is the public advertisement built from it. The description exists for compliance and compensation. The posting exists to get qualified people to apply.
Should I include salary in a job posting?
Yes, and in a growing number of states you have no choice. Colorado, California, New York, Washington, Hawaii, and Illinois all require pay ranges in postings under their pay transparency laws. Even where it is optional, a posted range filters out candidates whose expectations you cannot meet before anyone wastes an interview slot.
What should the first two sentences of a job posting say?
What the person will do and why the role exists. Skip the company history. Candidates scanning fifteen postings on a phone decide in seconds whether to keep reading, and a paragraph about your founding story in 2019 is not what keeps them there.
How many requirements should a job posting list?
Five to seven, and every one of them should be something you would actually reject a candidate over. Long requirement lists shrink your applicant pool, and they shrink it unevenly. Tara Mohr's 2014 Harvard Business Review piece on why women apply less often documented the pattern: candidates who do not meet every listed criterion frequently do not apply at all.
Can I reuse the same job posting template for every role?
The structure, yes. The content, no. Keep a fixed skeleton of title, summary, responsibilities, requirements, pay, and application steps so your postings stay consistent and easy to compare. Rewrite the substance every time, because a warehouse posting and a staff engineer posting are speaking to completely different readers.
Resources & Further Reading
Related Guides
- How to Write Job Descriptions That Attract the Right People
The internal document behind every posting
- Job Description vs Job Posting: What Is the Difference?
Two documents, two jobs, constantly confused
- Pay Transparency in Hiring: What Employers Need to Post
State-by-state rules for salary ranges
- Prepzo Job Board Distribution
Post once, syndicate with correct markup
External Sources
- EEOC: Prohibited Employment Policies and Practices
Covers discriminatory language in job ads
- Google: JobPosting Structured Data
Get your roles into Google job search
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: JOLTS
Openings and quits data by industry
- SHRM: HR How-To Guides
Templates and compliance references
