When Robin Olsen started applying for communications jobs three months ago, she noticed a change: The job descriptions had gotten longer. One combined communications and marketing, normally two separate functions, into one. Others seemed to have “crazy wish lists,” Olsen says. One was so overwhelmingly long that it made Olsen close it from her browser. “My premise is that if you really believe that one person can do all that, this is not the place for me,” Olsen says. “No one could ever manage to have 27 priorities.”

When scrolling through LinkedIn, it’s easy to find job descriptions that rival CVS receipts, with so many responsibilities that they are divided into several subheadings. A list of corporate communications leaders asks applicants to meet nine qualifications, reinforced by six other “preferred qualifications” and cover 22 responsibilities. An AI engineer job has 11 “essential duties and responsibilities” and 11 other skills (including a “positive energetic attitude”). A revenue strategy and operations leader is expected to perform 13 responsibilities and meet a dozen qualifications divided into five categories.

The average length of a job title has increased from 2.4 words in 2013 to four words last year, according to an analysis of job postings by human resources software company BambooHR, which found that long, highly specific niche roles were increasing the number of characters. Recruiting platform Greenhouse found that the average number of characters in a job description increased 7.4% between 2022 and 2026, the four years since ChatGPT became widely available. During the same period, the number of sections in a job posting grew by almost 14% and skills sections increased by almost 16%. In fact, it found that the number of words in a post grew by 14.3% between 2021 and 2025.

What makes the ever-expanding job description great? What else: AI. In some, hiring managers have overlaid new AI competency and pedagogical expectations onto standard job tasks. Other listings, recruiters tell me, have been inflated because hiring managers generated them with long LLMs.

“Managers don’t have to edit themselves, so they’re just throwing the kitchen sink in there,” says Marc Cenedella, CEO of career site Ladders. “They’re throwing out nice, possible things and passing thoughts they had in the shower this morning.” Descriptions are filled with input from people with no direct supervision over the position, and there are no benefits to applicants or recruiters, he says.

The job search is interrupted. Recruiters say cover letters and resumes have lost their meaning at a time when anyone can personalize their applications for positions by running them through ChatGPT. When it comes to job descriptions, AI compounds the problem—its verbosity leads to long bulleted lists centered on corporate-speak buzzwords—but technology has also changed expectations quickly. Workers are encouraged, and even expected, to take on more tasks with AI at their disposal. Job seekers must sift through walls of text to discern if they are qualified, adding another barrier to the complicated and lengthy job search.

“More paragraphs don’t mean better hiring,” says Cenedella. “More bullets don’t mean a better fit. That’s why these increasingly longer job descriptions are hurting candidates and hurting companies.”

The signal for choosing the best person for the job could be concise.

The oldest known job advertisement dates back to 1752, published in a Virginia newspaper by an employer seeking an oystercatcher. There were only two requirements: that the applicant be “a sober person, well recommended.” For more than 200 years, advertisements were fairly concise, as employers paid per line to publish them in newspapers. Then online job boards freed them from the confines of classified ads. Tedious applicant tracking systems and additional application questions or exams have lengthened the process. The jump accelerated before generative AI was widely available, and BambooHR data shows that job descriptions increased 17% in character length between 2016 and 2025, with the biggest acceleration coming between 2021 and 2022.

These increasingly longer job descriptions are hurting candidates and companies.

“We’ve gotten a long way from what the actual intent of a job description is and what it should be,” says Trent Cotton, head of talent insights at recruiting software company ICIMS. Companies began adding lines about company culture and seeking to “sell the job,” Cotton says, but that kind of culture conversation is better suited to a job interview. The listing, he says, should act as a scorecard, where the candidate, recruiter and hiring manager can evaluate a person’s skills and compatibility with the job. “Hiring managers and recruiters are trying to make it so granular to try to create some kind of way to deflect candidates, but they’re doing it the wrong way,” he says. “They’re just adding a lot of paragraphs but not a lot of substance.”

Many companies now prioritize skills-based hiring, weighing practical skills over prestigious degrees and experience at top companies. This change has also led to an increase in the skills sections of job advertisements. “To match a job to a talent or a talent to a job, they’re putting as much information as possible into that job” to help AI match the skills listed on a resume to those in a job, says Tara Marcelle, vice president of recruiting for the U.S. operations at staffing firm Manpower. “It can really help rank those candidates.”

Some of the confusing job descriptions reflect the great upheaval ahead for administrative work. Marketers now modify code, software engineers review more code, and companies like Meta have promoted a future where one person can do work that was previously done by an entire team, as some people are dispute agents. “There are a lot of unknowns here,” says Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of recruiting firm Twill. The posts are padded and become “like an umbrella, where they just put all the possible scenarios that this person will do within the next six to nine months, because they don’t know who they’re going to need six months from now.”

The growing job descriptions are not just a nuisance. Women are less likely to apply for jobs if they do not meet all of the stated qualifications, and they are less likely to apply for jobs with vague language on the list, because they fear they are not qualified for a job. Men worry less about having the same skills before clicking to apply, research from Harvard Business School shows. This imposter syndrome can perpetuate low numbers of women in leadership positions and in male-dominated fields. A job posting looking for a unicorn could scare qualified applicants from applying.

Applicants also have AI in their arsenal. They ask great language models to customize their resumes and cover letters to include buzzwords and skills, and then recruiters have to figure out who can really do the job. Getting a pool of applicants who bring an authentic, AI-free application to the table might require standing out amid the decline of corporate AI in other jobs.

Jamie Hodari, CEO and co-founder of coworking space Industrious, is looking for someone to fill his CEO role. The description he wrote isn’t brief, but it swaps typical corporate language for a cheeky list of the people the CEO will manage, from members of a book club to two people fighting over control of the thermostat, and ends with how the job will involve making decisions about managing people who may be experiencing difficult personal situations (“the truest description of this job is not a list of responsibilities, it’s a list of people,” it reads). Hodari tells me he thought of the description as a note to his successor, the same way an outgoing president leaves a note for the incoming president-elect. He also says that the authentic, less scripted approach has become “the most effective recruiting-related thing I’ve done in my career,” and applicants have responded to the message with their own deeply personalized requests and responses.

In a job market where AI writes job descriptions, edits resumes, and evaluates them, recruiters and applicants are becoming increasingly frustrated as employers appear to hold the power in the labor market. “Once you go back to a demanding market and compete for talent, all these things are solved,” Cenedella says.

Just as applicants are encouraged to keep their resumes and cover letters to one page each, job writers may want to do the same.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent for Business Insider covering the tech industry. Write about the most important trends and technology companies.