A startup’s head of people uses AI to write a job description for a Head of Marketing hire. She provides the role title, a list of responsibilities, and a list of required qualifications. The output is professional, comprehensive, and reads like a job description for every Head of Marketing at every startup: “Drive brand awareness, develop go-to-market strategy, manage demand generation, lead a team of marketing professionals, collaborate cross-functionally.” Required qualifications include “5+ years of experience,” “strong communication skills,” and “data-driven mindset.” The role gets 340 applications. Of those, 280 are broadly qualified marketing leaders who would probably do fine at any marketing job. Eight are the specific kind of hire the company actually needs: a performance marketer who can build a paid acquisition engine from scratch, is comfortable operating with no team for the first year, and has specific experience in B2B SaaS with long sales cycles. She spends two weeks screening applications to find them. The job description described a role. It did not describe this role.
Why Generic Job Descriptions Attract Generic Candidate Pools
A job description is not a neutral document. It is a filter — it determines who self-selects in and who self-selects out. A generic job description with broad requirements and a comprehensive list of responsibilities tells every broadly qualified candidate that they might be a fit. The specific candidate who would thrive in this role reads the same description and has no idea whether it is meant for them. The rare specialist — the person who has done this exact thing before, in this specific context — may not apply because the description does not signal that the company knows what it actually needs. The specificity that attracts the right candidate and deters the wrong one cannot come from a template. It has to come from the hiring manager who knows what success in this role actually looks like — not “strong leadership skills” but what specific leadership challenge this person will face in the first six months.
What a Job Description Brief Needs to Specify
A job description brief that produces a useful posting needs four things beyond the title and responsibilities. The real challenge of the role: what is the specific hard thing about this job? Every role has one — not the sanitized version that sounds appealing, but the actual constraint or difficulty that will determine whether someone succeeds or fails. Naming it in the description attracts people who have solved it before. The context that changes the role: what is specific about this company, team, or stage that makes this role different from the same title elsewhere? A Head of Marketing at a 12-person startup is a different job than the same title at a 400-person company, and the candidate pool should be different. The anti-criteria: who would fail in this role? A candidate who needs a large team and an established playbook will fail in a role that requires building from scratch. A candidate who thrives on process will fail in a role that requires constant ambiguity. These filters are as important as the requirements — and they belong in the description. What the first 90 days actually look like, specifically.
What a Properly Briefed Job Description Request Looks Like
Role: You are helping write a job description for a Head of Marketing
at a 15-person B2B SaaS startup.
The real challenge of this role: The company has grown to $2M ARR
entirely through founder-led sales and a small amount of outbound.
There is no marketing function, no established campaigns, and no
brand presence in the market. This hire needs to build the demand
generation engine from zero — not manage an existing one.
What makes this role specific to this company: B2B SaaS, average
deal size $40K, 6-9 month sales cycle, highly technical buyers
(VP Engineering/CTO level). The company's moat is technical
differentiation that is not easy to communicate. The marketing
challenge is as much about education as awareness.
Who would fail in this role: Someone who needs a team to execute,
an established brand to amplify, or a short feedback loop between
marketing activity and revenue outcomes. This is a 12-18 month
infrastructure build before the demand generation engine produces
consistent pipeline.
Who would succeed: Someone who has built a demand gen function from
scratch in a technical B2B context, is comfortable owning both
strategy and execution for the first 12 months, and has experience
marketing products where the buyer's technical literacy is high.
First 90 days: Audit current pipeline for marketing-attributable
signals, launch one paid channel experiment, build the content
foundation (3-5 technical pieces) for SEO and sales enablement.
Write a job description that signals these specifics clearly — not
one that would attract every marketing leader, one that would attract
the specific profile described.The description from this brief tells the right candidate exactly what they are walking into. The wrong candidate reads it and self-selects out. The screening process narrows to people who specifically want this challenge.
The Job Description Is a Filter, Not an Advertisement
A job description that tries to appeal to the widest possible audience produces the widest possible candidate pool — and buries the specific hire in it. The brief that contains the real challenge, the specific context, and the honest anti-criteria produces a description that functions as a filter: it attracts people who have done this specific thing and repels people who would be miserable in this specific context. That filter is worth more than any screening question. For hiring managers and HR teams building role descriptions, Briefing Fox structures the brief so the real challenge, the specific context, and the success profile are captured before any job description is written.
Before Your Next Job Posting
Before asking AI to write any job description, write down the real challenge of the role — the specific hard thing — and one sentence describing who would fail in it. Those two inputs are the brief. The description that finds the right hire is built on what is specific and honest about the role, not on what makes it sound attractive to the broadest possible audience. Try Briefing Fox free at www.briefingfox.com.
Because they describe a category of role rather than this specific role in this specific context. Broad requirements and comprehensive responsibility lists tell every broadly qualified person they might fit — including people who would be miserable in this particular environment.
Naming the real challenge — the specific hard thing about this job — and the anti-criteria: who would fail in this role and why. The right candidate reads the challenge and recognizes themselves. The wrong candidate reads the anti-criteria and self-selects out.
The real challenge of the role (not the sanitized version), what is specific about your company stage or context that makes this role different from the same title elsewhere, who would fail in this role, and what the first ninety days actually look like. These inputs produce a posting that filters rather than attracts everyone.
Be specific about what experience is required versus what can be learned in the role. “Has built a demand generation function from scratch” is a genuine requirement if the role needs it. “Strong communication skills” is not a useful filter. Specificity about what’s non-negotiable clarifies the field without unnecessarily narrowing it.