I saw a job description last week for a Head of Supply Chain. It listed 47 separate responsibilities.
I counted.
I want to be clear: this was not a role for a team of four people cleverly disguised as one job. This was a single position, sitting in a mid-size manufacturing business in Northern Ireland, advertised at a salary I recognised immediately as being about eighteen months out of date.
The role had been live for eleven weeks. The hiring manager was starting to believe the right person didn’t exist.
The right person exists. The job description had made them invisible.
How we got here
There are two ways a job description ends up listing 47 responsibilities.
The first is the AI route. Someone opens ChatGPT, types "write me a job description for a Head of Supply Chain" and takes the output more or less verbatim. The result is a document that is grammatically fine, structurally logical and almost entirely useless as a recruitment tool. It describes every possible version of that role across every possible industry in every possible business context. It sounds authoritative. It finds nobody.
The second is the restructure route. Three roles get collapsed into one after a cost review, a restructure or a redundancy process that nobody quite had the honest conversation about. The new role inherits all the responsibilities from all three of its predecessors. Nobody removes anything because removing something feels like a decision that might come back to haunt someone. So everything stays, and the job description quietly becomes a small miracle of scope inflation.
The result in both cases is identical. A document that describes a person who doesn’t exist, at a salary that wouldn’t attract them even if they did.
What this does to your candidate pool
Candidates aren’t naive. A procurement professional with ten years of experience reads a job description the way I do: quickly, looking for the three or four things that tell them whether this role is actually for them.
When a job description lists 47 responsibilities, two things happen. The strong candidates look at the list, identify the four things they haven’t done at the level described, decide they aren’t a fit and move on. They don’t apply. They don’t ask questions. They close the tab.
The candidates who do apply are often those with fewer alternatives, a higher tolerance for a role that’s clearly not quite right, or a genuine misunderstanding of what the job actually involves. None of those are the people you were looking for.
By week six, the hiring manager is wondering why the applicants aren’t at the right level. By week ten, they’re wondering whether the market has anyone suitable. By week twelve, they’re calling a third agency and having the same conversation they had with the first two.
The market didn’t fail them. The job description did, because it wasn’t effectively positioned to attract a shortlist of qualified and interested prospects.
The only question that actually matters
When I sit down to review a role before a search starts, I ask one question: what does this person need to deliver in their first six months?
Not across three years. Not in a theoretical world where the business grows in five different directions at once. The first six months. What are the three or four things that, if this person does them well, will make the hire a success?
Those non negotiables that form the backbone of the job description. Everything else should focus on the longer term objectives. The why. Because this is what potential candidates decide rules them in (values aligned) or out (not aligned).
A Head of Supply Chain in a manufacturing business might need to stabilise a supplier relationship that has been deteriorating for eighteen months, reduce lead times on a critical product line and build a reporting structure that gives the board genuine visibility. That is a job description. It is also a brief that a strong candidate recognises themselves in immediately, because it describes a real problem in a real business, not an exhaustive taxonomy of everything a supply chain function might theoretically ever do.
The specificity isn’t limiting. It’s the thing that attracts the right person, because the right person wants to know what they’re actually walking into.
The thing nobody says out loud
AI is an excellent tool for many things in business. Writing a job description and posting it unchanged isn’t one of them. What AI produces is a composite. What you need is a description of a specific problem inside a specific business that a specific kind of person is going to want to solve.
Those are different documents. Only one of them fills the role.
I review every job specification before a search starts. This is almost always where the problem is. Not in the candidate market.
ENDS
