How long should a job description be?

A job description should be a few hundred words: long enough to state the role's purpose, its main responsibilities, the required qualifications, the pay range and the location, and short enough that a candidate reads all of it. If it runs to several screens, it is carrying boilerplate that belongs on the careers page.

Length follows content. The parts that earn their space are the summary, the responsibilities written as outcomes, a short required list, the salary range and the terms. The parts that inflate a description without informing anyone are the company history, the values paragraph, the legal boilerplate about equal opportunity that could be a single line with a link, and a preferred-qualifications list that reads like a wish list. Cut those and most descriptions land at a few hundred words on their own. A senior or specialized role can justify more, because the scope needs explaining.

Too short is a real problem too. JobsPipe's ghost score, which runs 0-100 and adds to the score for each warning sign, treats a thin description as one of them, alongside a missing salary, a stale posted date, a long-open listing and a mass-posting employer. A thin description is among the rarest warning signs across the collected boards, while a missing salary is by far the most common, but the two often travel together on postings that were never meant to be filled. Buyers of the data exclude both with max_ghost_score.

For teams building on posting data the length question flips: you want enough text to extract from. JobsPipe pulls technology_slugs, a seniority bucket, an occupation code and a salary from the description on every posting, and a one-line posting yields none of those. Search inside the text with description_or when a specific phrase, certification or tool matters more than the title.

The full treatment is on Job titles and descriptions.