The Longest Job Postings on Record
From a simple paragraph to an essay: why online job postings keep growing. Is it helping or just frustrating firms and candidates alike?
In its online advertisement for a data-entry specialist, the company said it was looking for someone with one to three years’ experience. The rest of the post’s 62 lines of text cited 17 responsibilities, 7 required qualifications (along with three that were preferred), and a dozen core competencies.
If you think that many job postings are starting to resemble those oft-derided, seemingly never-ending drugstore receipts, you aren’t imagining things. Hiring platform Greenhouse found that the average job-description character count increased 7.4% between 2022 to 2026. Over the same period, the number of sections in an average job listing grew by nearly 14%, with those dedicated to skills jumping by almost 16%. Another job platform, Indeed, found that the number of words in the average post grew 14.3% between 2021 and 2025.
The goal, of course, is to create postings that attract the right candidates, and filter out the growing number of people using AI to apply. But many talent professionals worry that they may simply be frustrating candidates—without improving results. “Job postings have become the corporate equivalent of a terms-and-conditions page,” says Quincy Valencia, Korn Ferry’s vice president of talent transformation.
Even in a market that favors employers, it’s no surprise that many organizations are trying to improve their hiring processes. Between 2022 and 2025, the average time from job posting to hire jumped 65%, from 29 to 48 days. Depending on which survey you’re looking at, anywhere from 80% to 95% of employers currently say they can’t find the talent they need.
But experts question whether job postings so lengthy that candidates jokingly compare them to Tolstoy’s War and Peace can help solve the problem. Some organizations are treating these announcements like compliance documents, rather than the advertisements they are. Companies fear that if they don’t exhaustively list the skills and experiences they seek, they’ll never find the right candidate. Instead, the laundry list of dozens of requirements might very well turn off potential candidates. “If the best prospects need AI to summarize the post before they’ll read it, you’ve probably already lost them,” Valencia says.
On the flip side, some organizations want to deter underqualified people from applying. But that’s not likely to happen, either, says Renee Whalen, Korn Ferry senior client partner overseeing both Consumer and Healthcare markets in North America. In the AI era, a candidate can easily fire off dozens of applications at once. Worse, they can claim on their résumés that they possess all of the listed requirements and competencies, even if they don’t. “Maybe clients think these longer postings might get them to a candidate faster, but they’re still going to have to sort through a lot of applications,” Whalen says.
Experts suggest that organizations need to rethink postings, along with their entire hiring processes. The first step may be to simplify what they require of candidates: They should list only one number-one priority, for example. At the same time, they need to make the job sound engaging. “Redesign the post as if you’re selling something and have a short time frame to capture their attention and get them interested,” Valencia says. Then use other methods, such as interviews or assessments, to more effectively narrow the field of qualified and interested candidates.
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