Set aside forty minutes and a blank page. Do not open the old posting, and do not open the job description in the shared drive, because both were written to describe a role rather than to attract a person, and copying either is how a posting ends up listing eleven responsibilities and no hours.
The method below runs in the opposite direction, from the actual work outward.
Step one: write out the first Tuesday
Not the role. One ordinary day, six weeks in, hour by hour. What time do they arrive, what do they touch first, who do they speak to, what does the middle of the day look like, what do they finish before leaving.
This takes ten minutes and it is the source material for everything else. It also surfaces the parts of the job people forget to mention, which are usually the parts that make somebody quit: the two hours of paperwork, the drive between sites, the customer-facing half nobody mentioned because it is obvious to the person writing.
Step two: split the day into must-have and teachable
Go through the list and mark each item with what it requires. Then be strict about which of those things somebody has to arrive with.
Most postings list every skill as a requirement, which is what produces a demand for five years of experience in a job that could be learned in five weeks. The honest question is what you are genuinely unwilling or unable to teach. For most small employers that comes down to a license, a certification, a physical capability, and some evidence of having held a job before.
Everything else moves to a line saying you will train it. That line does real work: it is the reason a good candidate one step below the role will apply rather than assume they are not wanted.
Step three: put the four decisive facts near the top
Pay range, schedule, location and physical requirements, in the first third of the posting.
Applicants make a keep-reading decision in seconds and they make it on these four. Burying them below three paragraphs about company culture means the decision is made without them, and the people who leave are disproportionately the ones with other options.
Say the range and say what moves someone through it: a certification, a year of experience, taking the on-call rotation. Several states now require a range in the posting, and stating one voluntarily costs nothing anywhere else.
Step four: describe the first month, not the mission
Three sentences. Who trains them and for how long. What they will be doing unsupervised by week four. What is provided and what they are expected to bring.
Skilled applicants are trying to work out whether you are organized, because a disorganized employer costs them money and evenings. A specific first month is the strongest evidence you can give them in a posting, and almost nobody includes it.
Step five: cut every line that cannot exclude anyone
Read the draft and strike anything that no reasonable person would read and think, that is not me. Team player, detail-oriented, passionate, self-starter, fast-paced. Each one is a line an applicant skips and a line you paid for if you are advertising by the word.
What replaces them is specificity that genuinely filters: works alone for most of the day, or never alone. Customer contact in every hour, or none. Outdoors in February. Lifting fifty pounds repeatedly to shoulder height.
Step six: say what happens next, with dates
How to apply, what you will do with it, and when they will hear. "We read everything and reply to everyone by the fifteenth" costs you one afternoon and it is remembered.
Candidates in trades and service work are used to applying into silence. An employer who answers is unusual enough that it becomes part of the reason people take the job, and it costs nothing.
Step seven: put it where the people you want already are
The draft is only half the job. A posting for skilled trade work behaves differently on a large national board than it does on a community page, a trade school's placement list, or a supplier's counter noticeboard.
The cheapest source, consistently, is the people already working for you. A referral arrives pre-screened by someone whose own working life gets worse if the hire is bad, which is a stronger filter than any interview. Pay for it plainly, half on the start date and half at six months, and tell everyone the same terms.
Whatever channel you use, keep the wording identical across all of them. Two versions of the same posting with different hours in them will be noticed and screenshotted, and the applicant who noticed is the observant one you wanted.
What this is worth in time
The forty minutes is the whole investment, and it comes back in the first week of screening. A posting that leaves out pay generates conversations whose only purpose is to discover that the role cannot pay what the applicant needs. Twenty of those is a day of somebody's working life, spent to learn something a sentence would have said.
The other return arrives later. Hires who leave in the first three months usually leave over the schedule, the physical reality of the work, or money, and all three are things the posting either stated or hid. A posting that filters honestly is doing retention work that nobody will ever send you a bill for, months before anyone is hired.