Write the Ad for the Person You Actually Want
The move in short
Connector — Before posting any new vacancy, the operations director pastes the draft job ad alongside the internal role specification and a plain description of the team it sits in into Claude with a standing prompt that returns a critique — language likely to repel target candidates, missing signals that would attract them, any requirement that inadvertently narrows the pool, and a revised opening paragraph — so the ad is calibrated before it goes live.
The Company
Brennan Tooling & Precision makes close-tolerance machined components for medical device and aerospace customers, mostly in Ireland and the UK. They've got about 73 people working out of a facility on the edge of Limerick. The place has been running for over twenty years, and a lot of the senior people — including the operations director, Ciarán — started on the shop floor. There's no HR department. There never has been.
The Pain
When a role needs filling, whoever needs it filled writes the ad. That's usually Ciarán. He's not a recruitment professional, he's running a production floor, and the job ads show it. He writes them the way you'd write an internal spec: lots of machinery names, years-of-experience requirements that he's pulled from somewhere, and wording that sounds fine to him because it sounds like the shop. Then the ad goes up, the applications come in thin, and two weeks later he's looking at a pile of CVs from people who clearly weren't reading the same ad he thought he wrote.
The Move
Before the next ad goes live, Ciarán pastes three things into Claude: the draft job ad, the internal role spec, and a short paragraph describing the team the person would join. He runs it against a standing prompt he's saved, which asks Claude to come back with four things: any language that's likely to put off the people he actually wants, any signals that would attract them that aren't in the ad, any requirements that are narrowing the pool more than he intends, and a rewritten opening paragraph.
Claude might flag that requiring "5+ years on Mazak multi-axis" in the opening line excludes strong candidates who've done equivalent work on different kit. It might point out that the ad says nothing about the fact that three of his current machinists came up through apprenticeships there, which is exactly the kind of detail that would land well with the people he's trying to reach. The rewritten opening gives him something to work from rather than starting over.
He's not outsourcing the hiring decision. He's just getting a second read before the ad is public, from something that doesn't have his blind spots.
The blind spot
It feels like the kind of thing that only matters once the ad has already failed. You write the ad, you post it, and then you find out if it worked. Checking it beforehand feels like extra work on something that's already done. The thing is, the cost of a bad ad isn't the ad — it's the six weeks of thin applications, second-choice interviews, and Ciarán spending time he doesn't have trying to fill a gap on the floor.
The pattern
The same move fits in a few other places:
- A founder writes the first outreach email to a potential distributor and runs it past Claude before sending, asking what a busy procurement contact might find off-putting or unclear.
- A finance director drafts a message to the team about a process change and checks whether it reads as reasonable or comes across as heavier-handed than intended.
- A sales manager writes a proposal covering letter and asks what a client in that sector would expect to see that isn't there yet.