A startup founder needs to hire a head of growth. She asks AI to write the job description. What comes back is clean and professional: a paragraph about the company, a list of responsibilities that covers all the expected growth functions, a requirements section listing five to seven years of experience and proficiency in standard tools, a line about being a “self-starter” who “thrives in a fast-paced environment.” She posts it. She receives forty applications. Thirty-five are from people who would be wrong for the role for reasons that have nothing to do with experience or tool proficiency. She spends three weeks filtering. The hire she eventually makes is someone she found through a referral, not through the job description. The job description filtered for the wrong things because the brief described a standard growth role, not her specific role.
What a Generic Job Description Actually Does
A job description is a filter. Its job is to attract the candidates who are right for this specific role and discourage the ones who aren’t. A generic job description fails at this function not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s interchangeable — it could have been written for any of a dozen companies hiring for the same title. Candidates read job descriptions looking for signals about what the role is actually like. Generic language — “fast-paced environment,” “cross-functional collaboration,” “results-driven” — signals nothing. Strong candidates who have options use the specificity of the description as a signal about the quality of the organization. Vague descriptions attract candidates who apply to everything; they filter out the candidates who only apply when they see a real match. AI produces generic job descriptions when given generic briefs. The brief is almost always too abstract: a job title, a list of functions, a set of qualifications that describe the average hire for that title rather than this specific role.
What the Brief Needs to Make Specific
A brief that produces a useful job description is uncomfortable to write, because it requires honesty about what is hard, what is different, and what the role actually demands versus what would look good on paper. The brief should include: what success looks like specifically at 90 days — not “ramping up” but a concrete outcome. What has been tried and failed in this area before, and why. What the role is harder than the title suggests. What kind of person historically gets frustrated in this environment and leaves. The two or three qualities that matter above all others for this hire — not credential proxies, the actual human qualities. And what the company cannot offer that the candidate might expect. The job description built from that brief will repel some applicants. That is the point.
What a Properly Briefed Job Description Request Looks Like
Role: You are a recruiting specialist helping a Series A startup write a job
description for a Head of Growth.
Context: The company is an early-stage B2B SaaS with strong product-market
fit in a niche vertical. The growth function has no existing team — this is
a founding hire. Previous contractors in this area failed because they defaulted
to playbooks from high-volume consumer contexts that do not apply here. The
right candidate needs to be comfortable with ambiguity and building from zero.
What success looks like at 90 days: a clear growth model specific to our ICP,
with one channel experiment designed and running.
What this role is harder than it looks: there is no existing data infrastructure,
no prior experiment history, and no growth team to inherit. The candidate must
build all of that.
What we cannot offer: a large team, a big budget, or an established playbook.
Constraints: The description should attract candidates who are energized by
zero-to-one work and filter out people who want to optimize an existing engine.
No generic language — every sentence should contain information a candidate
couldn't find in any other job description.
Output: A complete job description that is honest about the difficulty, specific
about what success requires, and distinctive enough that the right candidates
recognize themselves in it.The description produced from this brief does not appeal to everyone. It is not supposed to. It appeals to the specific type of person who is right for this role — and that is what makes it useful.
The Filter That Works Is Built on Specificity
The best job descriptions are written by people who have thought carefully about what this role actually is — not the idealized version, but the version that exists in this company at this stage with these constraints. That thinking almost never makes it into job descriptions because it requires saying things that feel off-brand: we don’t have infrastructure, we’ve had this problem before, this is harder than it sounds. Those are exactly the things that help the right candidate self-select in — and the wrong candidate self-select out. AI can turn that honest description into a compelling listing. The brief is where the honesty has to go first. For hiring teams who need to make multiple hires across different functions, Briefing Fox helps structure that briefing process — surfacing the role-specific questions that produce useful output rather than standard job description language.
Before You Write Your Next Job Description
Before asking AI to write any job description, write down: what success looks like at 90 days in a single concrete sentence, what makes this role harder than the title suggests, and what kind of person this role is wrong for. Brief AI with those three things before you describe the qualifications. The job description that attracts the right candidate is the one that tells the truth about the role. The brief is where that truth lives. Try Briefing Fox free at www.briefingfox.com.