Job descriptions with ChatGPT (and Claude or Copilot)

What you’ll end up with

A job description and person specification you can advertise, with the essential and desirable criteria split, the wording checked for anything that could exclude people, and the pay and location filled in by a person. The AI does the first draft; you do the deciding.

Before you start

You need your own notes on the role. Four things: what the job is for, the main duties, who the person reports to, and the skills you actually need (not the ones you’d like in a perfect world). Have your organisation’s job description template to hand too. If you haven’t got one, Acas publishes a free template, plus a version with two worked examples (an administrative assistant and a warehouse assistant). Its outline covers the main headings, the role’s main duties and who the employee reports to. That’s a good shape to aim for.

Steps

1. Write your notes on the role

Don’t polish anything yet. Write what the role is for in a sentence or two, list the duties in whatever order they come to you, and note the reporting line. Then the skills, split roughly into “can’t do the job without it” and “would be nice”. Rough is fine. You’re feeding material to a tool, not submitting a finished document.

Role name: [role name]
Main purpose: [one or two sentences on what the role is for]
Reports to: [job title of line manager]
Main duties:
- [duty 1]
- [duty 2]
- [duty 3]
Skills and experience needed:
- [must-have skill or experience]
- [must-have skill or experience]
- [nice-to-have skill or experience]

Checkpoint: one page of rough notes you could explain to a colleague in two minutes.

2. Get a structured draft

Paste your notes into ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot and ask for the structure. Tell it, in so many words, not to invent the pay or the location.

Using my notes below, write a job description and person specification for [role name].

The job description should have these headings:
- Job title
- Main purpose (one or two sentences)
- Main duties (as a list)
- Reporting line
- Working arrangements: leave this as a placeholder for me to fill in

The person specification should list skills, experience and qualifications, each labelled essential or desirable.

Do not invent a salary, grade or location. Leave those as [to be completed].

Here are my notes:
[paste your notes from step 1]

Checkpoint: a draft with clear headings, the duties as a list, a reporting line, and a person specification where every item is labelled. Check each duty against your notes; anything you didn’t give it comes out.

3. Split essential from desirable

AI drafts tend to stuff the essential column. A tool doesn’t have to explain to anyone why a good candidate got ruled out. So go through every criterion and ask one question: could someone do the job without this? If yes, it moves to desirable. If the honest answer is “they’d manage, but it’d be easier”, that’s still desirable.

Here is my person specification. For every criterion, answer one question: could someone do the job without this? Give a one-line yes or no with a short reason. If the answer is yes, suggest moving it to desirable.

Essential criteria:
- [criterion 1]
- [criterion 2]
- [criterion 3]

Desirable criteria:
- [criterion 1]
- [criterion 2]

Do not add new criteria. I will decide what moves.

Checkpoint: a short essential list where every item is something the person can’t do the job without. Everything else sits under desirable.

4. Run an inclusive-language check

This is where the law comes in. Acas says that when advertising a job you must not ask for or exclude anyone with a certain protected characteristic. The Equality Act 2010 lists nine: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. The government’s Responsible AI in Recruitment guide names discriminatory job advertising as one of the risks of AI in hiring, so a draft that sounds sure of itself still gets checked.

Acas gives examples worth knowing:

• “recent graduate” or “highly experienced” can discriminate by age, and you must be able to prove a good reason for any job requirement
• “barmaid” or “handyman” imply you want a man or a woman, so use language that defines the job, not the applicant
• a nationality instead of a language: “German-speaking sales rep”, not “German sales rep”
• clothing rules, such as a hairnet, that could clash with someone covering their head for religious reasons

Ask the AI to find these, but only to flag them. If you let it rewrite the whole document, you lose track of what changed.

Check this job description and person specification for any word or requirement that could exclude people by age, sex, race, disability or religion.

For each one, give me:
1. The exact phrase, quoted
2. Why it could exclude people
3. A neutral alternative

Do not rewrite the rest of the document. Only list the problem phrases.

[paste your draft job description and person specification]

Then you decide. A requirement can stay only if you can show a good reason for it.

Checkpoint: a list of quoted phrases with suggested alternatives, each one accepted or rejected by you.

5. Fill in pay, location and the practical details yourself

This part is yours. Pay and grade are a human decision, based on your budget and your pay structure. A figure the AI offers is a guess.

Then the practical details. Acas says to tell applicants what you’ll need from them, such as proof of the right to work in the UK, references and any health check before they start, and you must tell applicants how you’ll use their personal information. It also suggests giving applicants the job description, an application form, the person specification, information about the organisation and an equality and diversity monitoring form.

Check the application route too. Acas’s example: requiring a handwritten form when handwriting isn’t crucial to the job could disadvantage someone with dyslexia or arthritis.

AI can word the “what we’ll ask from you” section, but you type the facts.

Add a section headed "What we'll ask from you" to the job description, in plain English. Use only the details below and add nothing else.

- Proof of the right to work in the UK
- References: [number and type of references]
- [Any health check before starting, or delete this line]
- How we will use your personal information: [one line, pointing to your privacy notice]

Pay: [pay, confirmed by a person]
Location: [location and any flexible working]
Hours: [hours]

Checkpoint: pay, location and hours are in, typed or confirmed by a person, and applicants can see what you’ll ask of them and how their information will be used.

6. Final read and sign-off

Read the whole thing aloud. Does it sound like your organisation? Does the main purpose match the job you actually need doing? Is each essential criterion still something you’d defend if a candidate asked why it was there? Make the last edits by hand, then get it signed off by whoever approves vacancies before it goes anywhere near an advert.

Checkpoint: one approved document, with a named person who signed it off.

Common mistakes

• Nice-to-haves in the essential column. It looks harmless, but it quietly shrinks your pool of applicants.
• Vague criteria. “Excellent communication skills” is hard to assess and hard to interview against. Say what the person will actually do, such as writing clear reports for the team.
• Skipping the language check because the draft looks fine. Discriminatory wording usually does look fine. That’s the problem.
• Letting the AI fill in pay or location. If a figure appears that you didn’t give it, delete it.
• Accepting every suggested change unread. The tool flags; you decide.

When to keep AI out of it

Don’t use it to decide the grade or the pay. And don’t put anything about a named current employee into a prompt: their skills, their performance, whether they’d suit the new version of the role. If you’re redesigning a job someone already does, write the notes about the role, not the person.

The same goes for judging candidates later. The tool drafts words and structure. People decide who gets the job.