How to Read a Job Description
Most advice about reading a job posting assumes the posting is complete. Ours is not built on that assumption, because we can measure how incomplete they are. The single most useful skill is telling the difference between what an employer chose not to require and what the job board simply did not carry.
Key Takeaways
- • 9.5% of live postings carry under 500 characters of description. That is not enough room for a requirement.
- • 59.5% state no years-of-experience figure at all.
- • A missing salary is weak evidence. Pay is routinely lost between the employer's page and the listing you read, including by us.
- • The same employer can publish 120 characters on one feed and 5,000+ on another.
- • Absence of a requirement is missing data, not permission and not proof.
First, check whether there is a description at all
Before you read a posting closely, notice how much of it exists. 9.5% of live postings carry under 500 characters, which is roughly a tweet and a half. Some feeds are far worse than that: one large enterprise feed in our corpus runs a median of 123 characters, with 74% of its postings under 300. Two other feeds put every single posting under 500 characters, and another delivers descriptions hard-capped at exactly 500.
This is not employers being lazy. Held to a single employer, JPMorgan Chase publishes a median of 120 characters through one feed and over 5,000 through another, in the same weeks. Apple shows the same pattern between its own careers feed and an aggregator. The length is a property of the pipe, not the job.
Live postings under 500 characters
9.5%
4,954 of 52,300 sampled
Worst feed's median description
123 chars
74% under 300 characters
Same employer, two boards
41.7x
JPMorgan Chase, 120 vs 5,000+
Employers where board made no difference
14 of 18
The effect is real but not universal
Read the silences correctly
Three things are missing from most postings, and each absence means something different.
No experience requirement (59.5% of postings)
Almost always means nobody wrote one, not that there is none. Do not read it as an open door, and do not read it as a closed one. It is the absence of information. Judge from the responsibilities instead.
No salary (about two thirds of postings)
Weak evidence about the employer. Pay is often published on the company's own careers page and lost in transit to the listing you are reading. We made exactly this mistake ourselves and had to retract a published claim about Apple. Check the employer's own page before concluding pay was withheld.
No seniority word in the title (63.3% of postings)
Tells you nothing about level, and specifically does not mean mid or junior. Unlabelled postings that state a requirement ask a median of 4 years, with half wanting 5 or more.
Let the requirements be read for you
Seeker extracts the stated requirements from live postings and shows you where you clear them and where you do not.
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What to weight, and how much
Not every line in a posting carries the same evidential weight. Ranked by how much you should trust it:
1. A stated years figure, when present
The strongest signal on the page. It appears in only 40.5% of postings, which means when it is there, somebody decided to write it. Requirements also cluster on round numbers, so read 10 years as a band around 10 rather than a hard floor.
2. Named, concrete tools and credentials
Specific nouns like PostgreSQL, Tableau, CPA or a named licence are reliable, because they are hard to write by accident. Vague categories are much weaker, and often were never in the posting text at all.
3. The responsibilities section
More honest than the requirements list, because it describes the work rather than the ideal candidate. If the responsibilities look like things you have done, that matters more than a bullet you do not match.
4. The job title
The weakest signal on the page. Two thirds of titles name no level, Associate is not junior, and any tool that grades seniority from title keywords will call an office manager a senior role.
A practical checklist
If the posting is very short, find it elsewhere
A 120-character listing cannot state a salary, a level or a requirement. The same role often exists in full on the employer's own careers page. Search the company site before you decide the posting is uninformative.
Separate must-haves from the tool list
A stated years figure and a named licence are the requirements. A list of twelve technologies is a description of the environment. Candidates routinely disqualify themselves on the second kind.
Do not infer level from the title
Check what the body asks for. If the body asks nothing, the title has not told you either, and the posting is simply quiet about level.
How we measured this
Figures come from Seeker's corpus of 257,534 active postings on 16 August 2026. The description-length figures use a 20% systematic sample of 52,300 postings, and the employer comparison uses a full pass over every employer with at least 40 active postings on two or more boards.
One limit worth stating plainly, because it decides which half of this guide is trustworthy: we cap the description text we store at 5,000 characters, and about half of active postings sit on that cap. So we can measure the short end of the distribution accurately, and we deliberately publish no claim about which boards carry the most detail. Nothing in our pipeline can make a description shorter than the feed delivered it, which is why the “almost nothing” figures are safe. Full method on the insight page behind this guide.
Common questions
Should I apply to a job with a very short description?
Yes, and try to find the full version first. A short listing usually reflects the feed rather than the employer, and the same role frequently appears in full on the company's own careers page where you can actually judge fit.
Does a job with no listed requirements mean anyone can apply?
No. It means nobody wrote a requirement into that listing. 59.5% of postings state no years figure, and a short posting physically cannot carry one. Absence is missing data rather than permission.
Are the skills in a job posting all required?
Treat a long tool list as a description of the environment rather than a checklist. Concrete named tools and credentials are reliable signals; broad category words are the least reliable thing in a posting and frequently were never written by the employer at all.
Why does the same job look different on two job boards?
Because each feed carries a different amount of the original text. We measured one employer publishing 120 characters through one feed and over 5,000 through another in the same period. The job did not change; the pipe did.
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