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.