A vague job description is the most common JD a candidate encounters. The role is "senior individual contributor with experience in our domain." The responsibilities are "drive impact across cross-functional teams." The requirements list 15 skills, of which the company plausibly cares about 4. The candidate has to decide how to tailor to a document that's mostly noise.

This post is the working approach: read what's real, ignore what isn't, and decide how much to invest before you start writing.

The four-quadrant triage

A useful first step on any vague JD is to triage the information availability — separately from the JD itself, how much can you learn about the role?

Vague JD + strong company signal. This is the most common case at companies with active engineering or product blogs, public talks, recent press, or a clear strategic narrative. The JD might be generic, but the company is broadcasting what they care about. Tailor to the company's stated direction — it's a more reliable signal than the JD's wish list.

Concrete JD + strong company signal. The best case. Tailor straight from the JD, supplemented by company context. Normal tailoring rules apply — see tailor-resume-to-job-description.

Vague JD + weak company signal. A small company with no public footprint and a vague JD. There's not much to tailor to. Lean on the role title and seniority. Send a base tailored resume; don't over-customize the cover letter. Save your effort for higher-information targets.

Concrete JD + weak company signal. Less common, but real. A small or quiet company with a sharply written JD. Tailor straight from the JD; treat company fit as unknown until you talk to them.

What's signal and what's noise

A vague JD usually has 60-70% boilerplate and 30-40% actual signal. Distinguishing them is the skill.

Signal. Repeated nouns and skill verbs across sections (especially in both the "responsibilities" and "requirements" lists). Specific tools or platforms named even briefly ("experience with Snowflake or BigQuery"). Seniority level + scope of ownership stated ("you'll own the platform's reliability"). Team-structure clues ("part of a 5-person team," "report to the engineering manager"). Anything specific from the company's recent public work.

Noise. Boilerplate "self-starter" clauses. Generic EOE and benefits paragraphs. Buzzword inflation ("rockstar," "ninja," "guru" — usually signal a non-technical writer). Long skill lists with 15+ items — these are aspirational, not all required. Specific years-of-experience numbers — often padded by 1-2 years from what the company will actually accept (see 70-percent-match-rule).

The triage exercise: cross out the noise. What's left is what you tailor to.

A 10-minute triage process

A working triage for a vague JD:

1. Read the title and seniority twice. The title carries most of the role's information when the body is vague. "Senior Backend Engineer, Platform" tells you more than three paragraphs of fluff. "Director of Product" tells you the scope, the level, and the reporting chain implicitly.

2. List the repeated nouns. Skim for nouns that appear 2+ times across the JD. Those are the concepts the company is actually paying attention to — usually 3-5 of them. Tailor to these, not to every word.

3. Find the company's recent public work. Spend 5 minutes on their engineering or company blog. Read the most recent 2-3 posts. The company is usually broadcasting their current focus more clearly here than in the JD. This is where the highest-leverage tailoring comes from.

4. Identify must-haves vs. wish list. A list of 15 skills includes 3-5 must-haves. The first paragraph and any bolded items are usually the real requirements. The rest is wish list. See reading-between-the-lines-of-a-jd for the full taxonomy.

5. Decide your tailoring budget. Vague JD + unknown company = 10-15 minute tailoring maximum. Vague JD + strong company signal = full tailoring. Don't spend 90 minutes on a posting that gives you 15 minutes of usable information.

When the company's blog tells you more than the JD

A specific pattern: the JD says "drive impact on our data platform." Vague. But the engineering blog has three posts in the last six months about migrating off Redshift onto Snowflake, debugging slow queries, and rolling out dbt. Now you know what "drive impact on our data platform" actually means.

In this case, the JD is hiring-process boilerplate (HR wrote it, the actual team didn't review the final draft) and the blog is the real signal. Tailor to what the team is actually doing, mentioned in the blog, even if the JD doesn't list those specific tools.

This is the most underused tailoring move. Most candidates tailor to the JD's literal text and miss the much richer signal in the company's public work.

What about JDs with 20 required skills?

A JD listing 20 required skills is signaling either (a) HR copy-pasted from multiple templates, or (b) the hiring manager hasn't been disciplined about scope. Either way, the candidate's move is the same: assume 3-5 of the 20 are real must-haves and ignore the rest.

Heuristics for picking the real ones:

• Skills mentioned in both the responsibilities and requirements sections.
• Skills mentioned in the first paragraph.
• Skills that are tool/platform-specific (not generic verbs like "communication" or "leadership").
• Skills that align with the company's recent public work.
• Skills consistent with the seniority level (senior roles don't realistically require 20 different tool fluencies).

Don't try to keyword-stuff all 20. See keyword-stuffing-vs-keyword-fit for why this backfires.

When to skip the application entirely

A specific decision point: vague JD + weak company signal + posting open for 60+ days = strong "ghost job" risk. Three rough criteria:

• The JD is generic.
• The company has no recent hiring traction (no LinkedIn posts about the team, no public engineering work, no growth signals).
• The posting has been up for two months.

Combined, these suggest either a perpetual aspirational posting or a job that's already filled and never closed. See ghost-job-postings for the longer treatment.

What this isn't

A few clarifications:

• It's not a license to skip tailoring on every vague JD. Some vague JDs are at companies you really want to work at. Invest accordingly.
• It's not a substitute for talking to the recruiter. A 15-minute recruiter screen often clarifies more about the role than 90 minutes of JD analysis. Apply, get the call, and ask.
• It's not a guarantee. Sometimes the JD really is the full description and the role is exactly as vague as it sounds. Probationary roles, exploratory hires, and reorganizing teams are real.

The short version: read the title, find the repeated nouns, skim the company's recent public work, identify the real must-haves, and right-size your tailoring effort. Don't over-invest in a vague JD with no company signal — there's nothing reliable there to tailor to.