Stage 1 · Before you apply · 6 min read
Job Description Guide: Decide in Ten Minutes Whether to Apply
The 70% rule, what the posting's phrases actually mean, the red flags worth walking past, and how the same page becomes your interview questions.
A job description is written by three people who disagree: the hiring manager who knows the real problem, the recruiter who wants the funnel wide, and a template that has been copied since 2019. Reading it as a checklist you must fully meet is how good candidates talk themselves out of the roles they would get, and into the ones they would not.
Read it instead as a brief: what is broken on this team, which five requirements are real, and which questions the interviewer will build from it. Ten minutes per posting is enough.
1. The 70% Rule
Split the requirements into the ones the hiring manager wrote and the ones the template added:
- The first five bullets under "responsibilities" are the job. Those are the problems you will be asked about in the room. Match three of the five with a story you can tell at an 8, and the posting is a target.
- "Requirements" split into must-haves and wishes. A must-have names a license, a legal status, a shift pattern or a specific tool used daily. A wish says "familiarity with", "exposure to", "a plus" or lists eleven technologies in one line.
- Years of experience are a prior, not a gate. "5+ years" means the manager pictures someone mid-career. Four years of the exact work beats seven years of adjacent work. Apply at 70% of the real requirements; the people who wait for 100% are rarely the ones hired.
Women and career switchers apply later and less often against the same posting; the rule exists to correct for that, not to encourage spraying. If you match under half of the first five bullets, skip it and keep your afternoon.
2. Decode the Phrases
Postings repeat the same twenty phrases. Most are harmless. A few tell you what to prepare for, and a few tell you what to ask about:
| What it says | What it usually means | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|
| "Fast-paced environment" | Priorities change weekly; sometimes it means understaffed | Have a story about delivering with fewer resources than planned; ask in the interview what changed in the last quarter's roadmap |
| "Wear many hats" | Small team, no specialist to hand things to | Lead with your breadth as an edge (the career switcher guide shows how) |
| "Self-starter" / "comfortable with ambiguity" | Nobody will tell you what to do first | Prepare a 60-day story: what you audited, what you fixed first |
| "Strong communication skills" | A past hire talked too much or wrote too little | Keep every answer to about a minute and a half; send a two-paragraph follow-up, not a page |
| "Familiarity with X" | X is a wish; they will teach it | Say honestly whether you have used it and give the closest analog |
| "Expert in X" | You will be the one others ask about X | Expect a deep dive on X; have two stories with trade-offs ready |
| "Competitive salary" with no range | The band is wide, or it is low | Ask for the band in the recruiter screen before you give a number (the negotiation guide has the lines) |
| "Other duties as assigned" | Boilerplate, and occasionally a second job hidden in the first | Ask what the last person in the role spent most of their week on |
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“Describe a time you had to juggle multiple competing priorities. How did you decide what to do first, and what gave?”
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- Describe a time you had to juggle multiple competing priorities. How did you decide what to do first, and what gave?
3. Mirror the Words, Not the Whole Posting
The person or the parser reading your resume is looking for the posting's nouns. Give them the nouns, inside bullets that are true:
| The posting says | Your top bullet for that application says |
|---|---|
| "Lead multi-site EHR implementations" | "Led EHR go-lives for 24 regional clinics; cut average go-live from 6 weeks to 3.5" |
| "Reduce first-response time across support channels" | "Cut first-response time from 9 hours to 45 minutes across 1,400 weekly tickets in email, chat and phone" |
| "Own reliability for the checkout service" | "Owned checkout reliability: replaced synchronous retries with a dead-letter queue, p99 held under 180 ms through peak" |
| "Use assessment data to drive instruction" | "Regrouped 115 students weekly from exit-ticket data; benchmark proficiency rose from 54% to 78%" |
Two rules keep this honest. Re-order and re-word the bullets you already have; never add a bullet for a thing you did not do. And mirror at most the first five bullets; a resume that echoes every line of a posting reads as a resume that echoes every posting.
4. Red Flags and Yellow Flags
Some postings are telling you not to apply. Read the signals before you spend an hour tailoring:
| Signal in the posting | Red or yellow | What it tends to mean |
|---|---|---|
| Three job titles' worth of responsibilities under one junior title | Red | Two people left and one is being hired back |
| Reposted every four to six weeks for a year | Red | The role is a backfill for churn, or it is never filled |
| "Must be able to work under pressure" plus "we're a family" | Yellow | Long hours are the culture; ask about on-call and the last crunch |
| No salary range where the law requires one | Yellow | Ask the band in the first call; the answer tells you how the company treats the rule |
| The requirements list a tool released last year as "5+ years" | Yellow | The posting was written by the template; the manager likely knows better |
| Four rounds plus a take-home for a mid-level role | Yellow | The process is heavier than the seat; ask up front how long the loop takes |
A yellow flag is a question for the recruiter screen, not a reason to skip. Two reds are a reason to skip.
5. The Same Page Is Your Interview
The posting is the interviewer's own prep notes. Every section of it becomes a kind of question:
- "Responsibilities" become scenarios. "How would you handle..." and "Tell me about a time you..." for each of the first five bullets.
- "Requirements" become deep dives. "Walk me through the last time you used X in production." The deep-dive guide covers the five layers.
- "Nice to have" becomes the gap probe. "Have you worked with X?" Answer it in one honest sentence and give the closest analog story.
Bashmo does this read for you. Add the position, paste the posting, upload the resume you tailored for it, and it writes about 20 questions: the role's own, the deep dives into your experience and the weak spots in your resume as that interviewer will see them. Answer them out loud until each holds an 8, and the first interview is the second time you have heard them.
6. The Ten-Minute Checklist
Before you tailor anything, answer these on the posting itself:
- Which five bullets are the job? Do I have a story at an 8 for three of them?
- Which requirements are must-haves? Do I hold every one of those?
- What is the one phrase that tells me what broke on this team?
- Is there a red flag? Two?
- Which three bullets on my resume move to the top for this one?
Five yeses, and the application is worth the hour. Fewer, and it is worth the ten minutes you just spent and nothing more.