How to Turn a List of Duties Into "A Day in the Job"

Read the "responsibilities" part of almost any job ad and you get something like "coordinating activities", "maintaining relationships with stakeholders", "ensuring quality". Okay. But what do I actually do on a Tuesday morning? Nobody knows after reading that. Not even the people who already do the job would recognize it.

That's the thing with a list of duties. It's written for HR, it describes the job on paper, and it doesn't help a candidate picture themselves there at all. A day in the job does. You just describe a real day: what happens at 8, who you talk to, what's hard, what's fun. And the easiest way to get that isn't to write it yourself. It's to ask someone who did the job yesterday.

What you need

• One person who does this job right now. Not the manager, not HR. Someone who actually did the work yesterday.
• 15 minutes with them, in person or on a call.
• Your phone to record the conversation (ask first).
• Your current job ad, so you know what you're replacing.
• The 6 questions and the paragraph template below.

Step 1: Find the right person and book 15 minutes

Ask the hiring manager who on the team would be good for this. You want someone who's been in the job for a while, at least a few months, but also not someone who's been doing it so long that everything feels normal. And ideally someone who actually likes the job. Not because you want to make it look nicer than it is, but because they'll talk about it with more detail.

Keep the ask small:

Hi {name},

We're rewriting the job ad for {job title} and I'd love to make it sound
like the real job instead of an HR document.

Could I ask you a few questions for 15 minutes this week? Nothing to
prepare, I just want to hear what a normal day looks like for you.

Would {day/time} work?

Step 2: Record the conversation and ask the 6 questions

Ask if you can record it, so you can listen instead of typing. Then ask these six, in this order:

1. What did you do yesterday between 8 and 10?
2. Who did you talk to or work with most yesterday?
3. What's the moment of the week you like most?
4. What's the hardest or most annoying part of the job, honestly?
5. What surprised you in your first month?
6. If a friend asked you "should I apply?", what would you tell them?

The trick is in the follow-up. People start vague: "Yeah, I mostly do planning." That's when you ask "What does that look like? Like, yesterday at 9, what was on your screen?" Keep asking for the concrete version: a time, a tool, a name, a number, a situation. Those details are what you're here for.

Question 4 is important, don't skip it. An honest downside makes the rest of the paragraph a lot more believable. And candidates who are fine with that downside are exactly the ones you want.

Step 3: Pull out the moments

Listen back to the recording, or read the transcript, and write down only the concrete stuff. Not "I work with a lot of people" but "I call the warehouse in Antwerp every morning at 7:30". Not "it's dynamic" but "around 11 the first trucks call in with problems".

A simple list is enough:

If you end up with mostly vague answers, that's on the follow-up questions, not on the person. Send them one or two short questions afterwards, like "You mentioned the Monday call, who's on it and what do you talk about?"

Step 4: Write the paragraph with the template

Now turn it into one paragraph. Not a list, a paragraph, written to "you" so the reader steps into the day.

Your day starts at {time} with {first real thing they do}.
By {time} you're {main task, described concretely}, working with
{who: team, clients, other departments}.
Most days, {a typical problem or moment} comes up, and that's where
you {what you do about it}.
The best part of the week is usually {favorite moment}.
The hard part? {Honest downside}.
Something that surprises most people in their first month:
{what surprised them}.

Use their words wherever you can. If they say "the morning rush", write "the morning rush", not "peak operational hours". And keep it to about 80 to 150 words. One good paragraph does more than a page.

Step 5: Check it with the person you interviewed

Send the paragraph back to the person you talked to and ask one thing: "Does this sound like your job?" If they say "yeah, but it's a bit nicer than reality", fix it. If they say "I'd never say it like that", ask how they'd say it. This step takes them two minutes and it keeps you honest.

You can even ask if you can use one sentence as a quote with their first name. That's another check on the scorecard: one real person, with a name and a quote.

Step 6: Replace the list of duties in your ad

Put the paragraph high in the ad, right after the opening lines about what the job is. Then look at the old list of duties. Most of it is now covered by the paragraph, so delete it. If there are two or three things that really need to be said and aren't in the paragraph, keep those as short lines. That's it.

Here's a before and after. This is a made-up example of a service technician job, not a real company:

Before (list of duties):

• Performing maintenance and repairs on customer installations
• Maintaining good relationships with customers
• Administrative processing of work orders
• Contributing to continuous improvement of the service process

After (a day in the job):

Your day starts at 7:30 at home, where you check the three or four jobs on your tablet and load the van. Most of the time you're at customers on your own, fixing heating systems that stopped working, and people are usually pretty happy to see you. Around noon you call the planner to see if something urgent came in. The best moment of the week, according to the team, is fixing something another company gave up on. The hard part? Winter. When it gets cold, everyone's heating breaks at the same time, and those weeks are long. What surprised most new people: how much of the job is just explaining to customers what went wrong.

The before tells you what the job is on paper. The after tells you if you'd want to do it.

What "done" looks like

• You did a 15-minute interview with someone who does the job now, and you have the recording or notes.
• You have a list of concrete moments: times, tools, people, situations.
• There's one paragraph of 80 to 150 words, written to "you", with at least one honest downside.
• The person you interviewed read it and said "yes, that's my job."
• The paragraph is in the ad and the old list of duties is gone or cut down to two or three lines.

Common mistakes

"A day in the job instead of a list of duties" is check 4 of the Job Ad Scorecard. And if your old duty list was full of phrases like "dynamic environment", The Cliché Tax shows what those are costing you.