Job advertising·Updated September 2026

Job posting template, job ad template and examples

A job posting has one job: turn someone who is scrolling into someone who has applied. Most templates optimize for a different thing — completeness, or legal cover, or looking like every other posting in the category.

This one is built from what moves the number. Across 891 frontline job campaigns we ran in 2026, the share of clickers who completed a form explained 70% of the difference in cost per applicant between campaigns — more than the ad creative and the ad auction combined. The posting is where most of that is won or lost.

Below: the template, the reasoning behind each section, where a pay range is now legally required, the words that cannot appear in a US help-wanted ad, and ten frontline openings you can copy.

The template

Nine blocks, in this order. The order matters: a phone screen of the posting happens in about four seconds, and everything that decides the tap is in the first two blocks.

Target length for the assembled posting: 201 to 400 words. See the next section for why.

Why each block is where it is

Three published datasets bear directly on the shape of a posting, and they agree with one another.

Length has a peak, and it is shorter than most postings. Appcast's analysis of its own job-ad delivery data — more than 10.2 billion clicks and 1.7 billion applications from over 400 companies since 2014 — puts the apply rate for postings of 201 to 400 words at roughly 8 to 8.5%. Under 200 words it falls to about 4.5%; past 701 words it drops reliably below 5%. Short job titles do the same thing: titles of one to three words averaged 3.41 clicks against 2.75 for titles over thirteen words. This is vendor-published first-party data rather than peer-reviewed research, and the per-bucket samples are not disclosed — but it is measured delivery, not a survey, and the direction is consistent with what we see.

Application length matters more than posting length. In the same dataset, an application taking one to five minutes converted at about 12.5%; one taking over fifteen minutes converted at about 3.6%. Our own figures say the same thing from the cost side: campaigns whose applicants never leave the platform populate the top conversion bands, and campaigns routing to a careers site or ATS flow populate the bottom two, at $23.13 and $53.77 per applicant against $4.41 and $1.61.

Posting pay does not cost you applicants. This is the objection we hear most, and the best available evidence says it is unfounded. Arnold, Quach and Taska (November 2025), using Lightcast data on more than 14 million postings, Glassdoor salary reports and QCEW administrative records covering roughly 97% of the US workforce, found that pay transparency laws raised posted salaries by 3.6% in Colorado and administrative wages by 1.3% overall — with no measurable effect on job posting volume, no reduction in employment, and no change in the skill or education requirements employers listed. The cost of disclosure showed up in wages, not in hiring capacity.

Worth knowing how unusual disclosure still is: Indeed's Hiring Lab pay-transparency tracker put the share of US postings carrying explicit wage information at 49.0% in June 2026. And the New York Fed found that as of January 2025, in Colorado, California, Washington and New York City combined, about 76% of postings included salary information — meaning roughly a quarter of ads legally required to state pay did not.

Where a pay range is legally required

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia require a pay range inside the posting itself. Three further states — Connecticut, Nevada and Rhode Island — require disclosure only on request or at a defined point in the process; lumping those in with posting mandates is the most common error in competing guides, so they are listed separately here.

Maine's LD 54 takes effect 90 days after legislative adjournment, which is why published sources differ by a day on the exact date. Delaware is listed for planning only.

City and county ordinances sit on top of the state map, and they are the layer most guides miss. New York City (1 Nov 2022), Ithaca (1 Sep 2022), Westchester County (6 Nov 2022) and Albany County (12 Feb 2023) in New York; Jersey City (13 Apr 2022) in New Jersey; and, most recently, two in Ohio — a state with no posting mandate of its own. Cleveland requires a salary range in any job notification for employers with 15 or more employees in the city, in force since 27 October 2025, with "salary" defined to include benefits. Columbus passed a comparable ordinance effective 3 December 2025 with enforcement delayed to 1 January 2027. If you hire hourly staff across an Ohio footprint, that is two new obligations in a state most compliance summaries still list as having none.

The practical answer for a multi-state employer is to post a range everywhere. Maintaining a per-jurisdiction posting policy for hourly roles costs more than disclosure does, and the research above says disclosure does not cost you volume.

The two sentences federal contractors must include

Most US employers have no federally mandated ad language at all. Federal contractors and subcontractors above the coverage thresholds still do, and after the 2025–26 rule changes exactly two prescribed sentences survive.

Executive Order 11246 was revoked in January 2025, and on 21 August 2026 OFCCP published final rules rescinding its regulations outright. What remains is Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act and VEVRAA, each of which still prescribes wording for solicitations and advertisements:

• 41 CFR 60-300.5(a)(12) — the contractor must state "that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their protected veteran status."
• 41 CFR 60-741.5(a)(7) — the contractor must state "that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability."

Two details worth carrying into a 2026 posting review. The VEVRAA contract coverage threshold rose from $150,000 to $200,000 under the same rules. And the familiar long EEO-AA paragraph that named race, color, religion, sex and national origin was grounded in EO 11246 — which no longer exists, so that block of boilerplate now has no regulatory basis even though it is still pasted into thousands of frontline postings. Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA and state law all still apply to how you hire; what changed is the prescribed ad wording. Our page on writing an EEO statement covers what to put there now.

Words that cannot appear in a US help-wanted ad

The ADEA's advertising rule, 29 CFR 1625.4, names specific terms that are unlawful in a help-wanted notice because they deter older applicants. These turn up constantly in restaurant, retail and gym postings.

The first six are named in the regulation; the last two are the same expression in current language and carry the same risk.

The regulation is asymmetric, and the asymmetry is useful: terms preferring older workers are expressly permitted.

For a frontline employer hiring for daytime coverage, part-time shifts or a second career, that is a legitimate and under-used targeting line. Asking applicants to state their age in the ad is not automatically unlawful, but the regulation says such requests "will be closely scrutinized to assure that the requests were made for a lawful purpose" — so the safe pattern is to ask only whether someone meets a genuine minimum-age requirement for the role.

Ten frontline job posting examples

The opening of a posting is the part that decides the tap, so that is what is shown here: the first lines as they would actually run, with the wage anchor from the BLS and, where we have it, what the role costs to advertise. Wage ranges in the examples are illustrative — use your own — but they are set around the national median so they read as realistic.

Cost-per-applicant and apply-rate figures: Boostpoint 2026 Social Job Advertising Benchmark. Wage figures: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, read 11 September 2026 (LPN and RN medians read 9 September 2026). BLS publishes an hourly median only for restaurant cooks, so no annual figure is quoted for that role.

What the template deliberately leaves out

• A company history paragraph. Nobody applying from a phone on a break reads "founded in 1987 by a family with a passion for care." Put it on the careers page.
• A long requirements list. Every line that is a preference rather than a disqualifier costs you volume and screens out people you would have hired.
• "Other duties as assigned." It tells a candidate the list above it was not the real list.
• A resume requirement. For most frontline roles this selects for people who happen to have a PDF on their phone, which is not a job qualification.
• A salary "commensurate with experience." In fourteen jurisdictions this is now unlawful in a posting, and everywhere else it reads as a refusal to answer.

Build the posting

Fill this in and it assembles the template above in order, counts the words against the 201–400 band, and gives you the text to paste. Nothing is sent anywhere — it runs in your browser.

The federal-contractor option inserts the wording prescribed by 41 CFR 60-300.5(a)(12) and 41 CFR 60-741.5(a)(7). Use it only if your organization actually holds covered federal contracts or subcontracts above the thresholds; most frontline employers do not.

Where this sits beside our other pages

This page is the template and the examples. Two neighbors cover different ground and there is deliberately no overlap: what makes a good job ad is the principles behind the choices, and job ad copywriting is the how-to of writing the sentences. Once the posting exists, how to advertise a job opening covers where to put it and what each channel costs, and recruiting strategies ranks the whole set of levers by measured effect.

Job advertisement template, job post sample, job ad: the same document under three names

Searchers ask for this document in at least four ways and mean roughly the same thing, so it is worth saying plainly which is which before you copy anything above. A job posting is the full version that goes on a board or a career site. A job advertisement is the shorter, persuasive version that runs as an ad, on a sign or in a feed. A job post sample or job advertisement example is a filled-in one you can read for structure rather than a blank to complete. All three are on this page: the blank is in the template section, the filled-in versions are in the ten frontline examples, and the cut-down advertising version is in the short-form section.

The practical difference is length and what gets cut. A job advertisement template keeps the pay, the schedule, the location and one disqualifying requirement, and drops the duties list, the benefits summary and the equal-opportunity boilerplate — not because those do not matter, but because an ad is read in about a second and a posting is read by someone who has already decided to consider you. If you only write one, write the posting and cut the ad out of it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources