You think to yourself: This company is completely delusional. Who wrote this?
The answer is: A stressed-out founder, a junior recruiter, and ChatGPT, playing a terrible game of telephone.
To succeed in the startup job market, you have to stop treating Job Descriptions (JDs) as legal contracts. They are not accurate reflections of what the company needs. They are Frankenstein documents assembled in a panic. Here is exactly how they get made.
The Telephone Game of JD Creation
Let's trace the lifecycle of a typical startup job description.
Step 1: The Panic. The engineering team is drowning. The lead engineer tells the founder, "We need someone to handle the AWS infrastructure, I can't do it anymore."
Step 2: The Delegation. The founder Slack messages the 24-year-old HR coordinator: "Please post a job for a DevOps person. We need them to know AWS and Docker."
Step 3: The Copy-Paste. The HR coordinator doesn't know what Docker is. So they Google "DevOps Engineer Job Description." They find a listing from Netflix. They copy the entire thing.
Step 4: The Inflation. The founder reviews the draft. "Looks good, but let's add Kubernetes just in case we need it next year. And make it 5+ years of experience so we get senior people." (Kubernetes was invented 4 years ago, but nobody checks this).
Step 5: The Publication. The JD goes live. It now describes a unicorn candidate that does not exist, for a salary that is 40% below market rate.
How to Decode the Garbage JD
Because JDs are aspirational wishlists written by non-experts, you should apply if you meet 40% to 50% of the core requirements. Do not self-reject because you lack one obscure bullet point.
When you read a JD, ignore the "Requirements" section and focus entirely on the "What You Will Do in the First 90 Days" section (if it exists). That is usually the only part written by the actual hiring manager.
If the JD is a massive wall of bullet points covering five different disciplines, it tells you something critical about the company: They don't actually know what problem they are trying to solve. They are hoping a magical candidate will walk through the door and figure it out for them.
The "Clarification" Strategy
If you get an interview for a role with a chaotic JD, your first goal in the screening call is to figure out what the job actually is. Use this script:
"I saw the job description covers a wide range of responsibilities, from SEO to event planning. In reality, what is the single most important metric this role will be judged on in the first six months?"
The recruiter will almost always laugh, admit the JD is a bit broad, and tell you the truth: "Honestly, we just really need someone to fix our paid ads right now."
Boom. You just bypassed the Frankenstein document and found the real job.
