Most job adverts don't work. Not because the role is hard to fill. Not because the talent doesn't exist. They don't work because what most companies post isn't a job advert at all. It's a job description with a logo on top, and those are two entirely different things.
I've spent years placing commercial leaders across US and UK medical device and healthtech companies. The single most common reason a search takes longer than it should isn't the market. It's the document the company put out into the market.
The document you're posting isn't an advert
A job description is an internal document. It was written to justify headcount, define accountabilities, and give HR something to file. It tells the reader what the company needs.
A job advert is a marketing document. It's written to persuade a specific person, almost certainly someone who already has a job and isn't looking, to stop what they're doing and want to know more. Those aren't the same job.
A map and a travel brochure cover the same geography. One tells you where things are. The other makes you want to go there.
The structural problem nobody talks about
The reason most companies post job descriptions instead of adverts isn't that they don't know the difference. It's that the document is produced by a process (HR governance, legal review, headcount approval) that was never built to produce an advert. It was built to protect the company, justify the spend, and satisfy compliance. It does all of that. What it can't do is make a busy, employed, successful commercial leader stop what she's doing and want to know more.
That's not a criticism of HR. It's a process design problem. The document was made in the wrong factory for the job it's being asked to do.
Who you're actually trying to reach
The person you want for a senior commercial role is almost certainly employed. They're not refreshing a job board. They're managing a territory, running a team, or preparing a board presentation. Your advert will appear in their LinkedIn feed between a news story and someone's promotion announcement. You have three seconds before they scroll past.
That person won't read 900 words of bullet points about key accountabilities before you've given them a single reason to care.
There's a further point worth understanding. The person who responds to a badly written advert isn't necessarily the person you want. Poorly constructed adverts repel strong candidates, who already have options and won't wade through corporate boilerplate, and attract weaker ones, who are actively searching and will read anything in hope. Your applicant pool is shaped by how you wrote the advert, not just by who the market contains.
Why more applications isn't a better outcome
Easy Apply on LinkedIn changed the economics of job advertising. Before one-click applications, applying required something from the candidate: a cover letter, a tailored CV, some actual effort. That friction was a filter. The candidate who went through it was, on average, more considered than the one who didn't.
Easy Apply removed most of that friction. Application volumes rose. Quality didn't.
I once advertised a COO role for a medical device company in Michigan and received 735 applications. Five were worth interviewing. One in 147. It wasn't a candidate quality problem. It was an advert quality problem.
The goal of a good job advert for a senior commercial role isn't to maximise applications. It's to minimise the number of conversations you need to have before you reach someone genuinely worth hiring.
A poorly written advert hides the difficult parts of the role, avoids naming specific requirements, and uses warm, inclusive language to deter no-one. A well-written advert that's honest about location, direct about the experience required, and specific about the commercial challenge the incoming person will face does something more valuable: it lets the wrong candidates take themselves out of the process before they've consumed any of your time.
How to find what to put in the advert
Before you open a blank document, try this. Imagine you're at a dinner party and you overhear someone talking. You realise from listening to them that they'd be perfect for the role you're trying to fill. You make an excuse to go over. You mention the role. They say: "Why do you think I'd be interested?"
Answer that question out loud. Whatever comes out naturally: those are your benefits. Record yourself if you need to. Because what you'll say instinctively isn't the job description. It's the two or three things you know about this opportunity that you think would genuinely interest someone like them.
Write those down before you write a single word of the advert. They are the first half of your document.
The two halves of a good advert
Think of a job advert as having two distinct jobs. The first half sells. The second half tells.
The sell is for the candidate who doesn't yet know they want this job. It covers the two or three things most likely to make the right person curious: the training budget, the product advantage, the territory opportunity, the company stage. Whatever you identified at the dinner party. Get those out early, develop them properly, and connect them to what they actually mean for the reader. "You'll receive support from a specialist team" is a feature. "You'll receive support from a specialist team, which means you'll build skills in your first six months that would take three years to find elsewhere" is a benefit.
The sell should be done in roughly the first half of your word count. If your best material is buried in paragraph six, most of the right people won't reach it.
The tell is for the candidate who's already interested and now wants to understand what the role actually involves. A bit about the company. What they'll be doing day to day. What makes this particular patch or product or team worth understanding. This is information, not persuasion, and it only works because the sell has already done its job.
Before you go further: be honest about the difficult parts
The most common mistake is hiding things the candidate will find out eventually anyway.
The location that's inconvenient. The territory that's underdeveloped. The product without full reimbursement. Companies omit these in the hope the candidate will be too far into the process to walk away once they discover them.
The candidate who's right for the role won't be deterred by genuine challenges. They've probably dealt with similar ones before. The one who's deterred by an honest description is probably not the right candidate. Burying the difficult parts produces applications from people who will later drop out, decline offers, or join and leave quickly once reality appears. Honesty in the advert isn't a vulnerability. It's a filter, and a useful one.
How to handle requirements
Keep this section short and put it near the end, just before your call to action.
Three bullet points is usually enough. Hard skills and direct experience only: no soft skills, no "excellent communication skills," no "ability to work in a fast-paced environment." Every salesperson believes they're a great communicator. Soft skills waste words and don't filter anyone out.
Tell them what they need to have done, not what kind of person they need to be.
If you go to market with more than three must-have criteria, you're narrowing your qualified pool without necessarily improving it. The requirements section should give the right candidate confidence they qualify, not give the wrong candidate a reason to apply anyway by burying the real bar in a long list.
The check before you post
Read the advert back. Does it sound like something a real person wrote to describe a real opportunity to another real person? Or does it sound like a document produced by committee to avoid saying anything specific?
Ask: have I told this person what's genuinely interesting about this role, or have I just described what it involves?
Ask: if I were the person I want to attract, and I read this on a Wednesday afternoon between two other things, would I take thirty seconds to respond?
Ask: what are the three most compelling things about this opportunity, and are they visible in the first half?
If you can't answer those confidently, the advert isn't ready.
A final thought
Writing a job advert well is a skill. Most people who write job descriptions for a living don't write job adverts for a living, and the two require quite different instincts.
The job description HR gave you isn't the starting point. It's research material. The starting point is the answer to one question: why would the right person leave a role they're probably content in, to come and do this?
When you can answer that specifically, compellingly, and honestly, you're ready to write the advert.
If you want someone to answer it with you (and then go find the right person), that's what a retained search is for. Get in touch.