Write your ideal job description: must-haves, nice-to-haves, deal-breakers, then test it against real postings

The template: write it like a posting

Use the headings that real descriptions use. O*NET, the occupational database published by the US Department of Labor, describes each occupation with sections such as Tasks, Work Context and Wages & Employment Trends; a posting adds the place, the team and the conditions. Borrow that structure, but write it about the job you want.

Fill in the table below in 20 minutes, without editing. The criteria rows are the part you will test, so be specific: “fully remote” and “remote two days a week” are different criteria. For the pay floor, the guide A job that pays the bills works out the salary your budget needs.

Must, nice, no: why at most three must-haves

Each must-have shrinks the number of postings that qualify, and they multiply. A simplified calculation of ours, assuming each criterion is met by half of the postings in your field and that criteria are independent of each other: one must-have leaves 1 posting in 2, three leave 1 in 8 (0.5 × 0.5 × 0.5 = 12.5%), five leave 1 in 32 (about 3%). Real criteria are rarely independent, and some are met by far fewer than half, so treat this as an order of magnitude, not a forecast.

Hence the rule: keep at most three must-haves, move everything else to nice-to-have, and keep deal-breakers for what would truly make you leave. If a criterion feels important but you would accept a good offer without it, it is a nice-to-have.

Test it against real postings

Read ten real postings for the title you wrote and score each one: must-haves met (out of three), nice-to-haves met, any deal-breaker. A posting that meets every must-have and no deal-breaker is worth applying to; a criterion that no posting meets is a signal about the market, not about you.

The table is an illustrative example, not a real person or real postings: someone aiming for a data analyst role, with three must-haves (remote at least two days a week, a team of at least three analysts, a pay floor of £38,000 a year) and one deal-breaker (regular weekend on-call).

If you cannot fill it in yet: three ways to get clearer

Clarity usually comes from information, not from thinking harder. Three sources, each a few hours at most:

• Your last two weeks. List the tasks you did and mark each one: gave energy, neutral, drained. The tasks that gave energy are candidates for the Main tasks line.
• The official description of the occupation. Look up the title in O*NET and read its Tasks list; tick the tasks you would like to do most days and strike the ones you would not.
• Two people who do the job. Ask each the same question: “What does an ordinary Tuesday look like?” Their answers will fill the Context line better than any posting.

Job crafting: use the description in the job you have

You may not need a new employer to close part of the gap. In 2001, Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton described job crafting: the changes people make on their own initiative to the tasks of their job, to their relationships at work and to the way they think about the job. In a 2010 Harvard Business Review article with Justin Berg, they turned this into an exercise that, in their words, “prompts you to visualize the job, map its elements, and reorganize them to better suit you.”

The evidence on organised crafting programmes is mixed. In a randomised controlled trial with 281 employees in Japan, published in 2020, two 120-minute group sessions a month apart had no significant effect on work engagement at three or six months; a small effect at three months appeared only among people who crafted little at the start, in an analysis the trial had not planned. Crafting is worth trying because it costs little, not because a programme reliably works.

Compare your ideal description with your current job and pick one gap. The table shows one crafting move per kind of change.

Turn the description into a nightly scene

The Main tasks line is the raw material for a process scene: one ordinary moment of the job you described, not the day you sign. In Dream Architect, the Work & purpose area offers 4 pre-written scenes among the app’s 84 in 21 life areas (counted in the app’s content on 22 October 2026); for this, use “Write my own moment” and write two present-tense sentences from your description: “Tuesday, 10 a.m., I open the dataset, my two colleagues are on the call, and I explain the first chart.”

The guide How to get your dream job, step by step turns the description into a weekly application rhythm, and Career scripting shows how to write a full future workday from it.

What the description can and cannot do

It makes your search specific, gives you a way to compare offers, and shows which criteria the market rarely meets. It does not create postings that do not exist, and writing it does not make an employer offer it. Update it after every ten postings you read: the market is part of the answer.

Questions people ask next