How to Write a Sales Job Description That Attracts Top Talent

What makes a sales job description work?

A sales job description works when a strong candidate can tell, within about ten seconds, what they will sell, who they will sell it to, and what they can realistically earn. Everything else, the company story, the values, the benefits list, is secondary. The best sales people are already employed and already being approached, so they read job adverts the way they read cold emails: quickly, sceptically, and looking for a reason to stop.

In the Barcelona multilingual market we see the same pattern repeatedly. Two companies open comparable roles at comparable salaries. One fills the seat in five weeks; the other is still interviewing in month four. Very often the difference is not the employer brand or the budget. It is the advert.

Why most sales job ads fail

The typical sales advert is written for the wrong reader. It is drafted to survive internal sign-off, to match an existing job architecture, and to stay consistent with the forty other roles on the careers page. It is effectively a compliance document that happens to be public. The candidate is not the audience; the audit trail is.

The result reads as a list of demands with no reason to care:

• Three paragraphs about the company before a single word about the job itself.
• Responsibilities written in internal process language, own the full sales cycle, manage the pipeline in the CRM, which could describe almost any sales role ever posted.
• A requirements list of twelve bullet points, several of which nobody in the current team would actually pass.
• No salary, no commission structure, no indication of deal size, quota or territory.
• A closing line about being an equal opportunity employer, which is right and necessary, but is not a reason to apply.

A strong candidate finishes that advert knowing nothing they could not have guessed. So they do not apply at all, or they apply casually and vanish at first contact.

Start with the job title

Name the language, not only the region

Account Executive DACH is a title written by someone who already works at the company. It assumes the reader knows that DACH means Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and that the role therefore requires German at a high level. German-speaking Account Executive (native level) does three things the first version does not. It tells a German speaker living in Barcelona that this advert is about them. It filters out applicants who will absorb two weeks of screening time before the language gap surfaces. And it matches what candidates actually type into a search bar: people look for work in their own language, not in your territory codes.

The principle holds across every market we recruit for. Nordics SDR underperforms Swedish-speaking Sales Development Representative. Benelux BDM underperforms Dutch-speaking Business Development Manager. Say the language, and say the level you genuinely need, native, fluent, or professional working proficiency are not interchangeable, and pretending otherwise wastes everybody's time.

Use titles the market recognises

Invented internal titles such as Growth Partner, Revenue Associate or Commercial Ninja cost you visibility and credibility at the same time. Nobody searches for them, and a candidate who cannot map the title onto their own CV will not apply. If the internal title matters for your job architecture, put it in the body of the advert and use the market-standard title in the headline.

The structure that works

1. What you will sell, and to whom

Open here, not with the company. Product, buyer persona, average deal size, sales cycle length, inbound or outbound, new business or expansion. Four or five sentences is enough. A sales person evaluating a move wants to know whether the job is credible before they care who you are.

2. Why the role is worth having

Territory maturity, existing pipeline, quota and current attainment across the team, progression, who they report to, and what support exists around them, SDR coverage, marketing-generated leads, solutions engineering. If the last three people in the seat hit target, say so. If the territory is brand new and unproven, say that too; some of the best candidates want exactly that.

3. What we actually need

Split the requirements into must-have and helpful. Keep must-have to four or five items and be honest about them. Everything else belongs in the helpful list, where it attracts rather than deters.

4. What happens next

State the number of stages, who the candidate will meet, whether there is a case study or role play, and the expected timeline. Process transparency costs nothing and converts well. Candidates with options choose the process they can plan around.

Publish the salary range

Hiding the range is the most expensive habit in sales hiring. A strong multilingual candidate in Barcelona typically has more than one conversation running. Faced with one role that publishes base and on-target earnings and one that does not, they engage with the first and file the second as a maybe. You are not protecting a negotiating position; you are removing yourself from the shortlist before it even forms.

Publish the base and the OTE. Say whether commission is capped. Say what proportion of the team reached OTE last year, an honest answer here builds more trust than an inflated number ever will. The regulatory direction of travel across the EU is firmly towards mandatory pay transparency in recruitment, and Spanish employers are already expected to keep and justify structured pay records. Writing competitive salary in 2026 does not read as discretion. It reads as a warning sign.

Tone and length

Cut anything that would sit unchanged in a competitor's advert. That includes rockstar, ninja, hunter mentality, fast-paced environment and wear many hats, phrases that signal a culture nobody has thought about carefully. Cut the tooling stack that lists five platforms when you need one, and cut the degree requirement if you would hire the right person without it.

• Aim for 400 to 600 words in total.
• Write in the second person: you will, you get, you report to.
• One idea per sentence. No sentence longer than about twenty-five words.
• Replace adjectives with facts. Exciting product means nothing; forty per cent year-on-year growth in the Nordics means something.
• Read it aloud. If it sounds like a press release, rewrite it.

A skeleton you can copy

Adapt the following outline. It is deliberately plain, the specifics are what convert.

Title: French-speaking Account Executive (native level), Barcelona, hybrid

Opening: You will sell our workforce management platform to HR and operations directors at French mid-market companies of 200 to 2,000 employees. Average deal size is 35,000 euros a year. The cycle runs eight to twelve weeks. Around 60 per cent of your pipeline comes from an SDR and from marketing; the rest you build yourself.

The opportunity: France is our second largest market and it is under-covered. You would be the third Account Executive on the territory, reporting to the Sales Director. Quota is 480,000 euros. Four of our six current AEs hit target last year.

Compensation: 45,000 to 55,000 euros base, 75,000 to 90,000 euros OTE, uncapped commission, hybrid working three days in the Barcelona office.

Must have:

• Native-level French and professional English.
• Two or more years closing B2B software deals of 20,000 euros a year or above.
• Experience selling to French companies, remotely or on the ground.
• The right to work in Spain, or willingness to relocate with our support.

Helpful: HR technology background, experience with a structured sales methodology, Spanish or another European language.

Process: Thirty-minute screen with our recruiter, one hour with the Sales Director, a role play with two team members, a final conversation with the founder. Four stages, around two and a half weeks from first call to offer.

The test to run before you publish

Send the finished advert to your best current sales person and ask one question: would you have applied to this? If the answer is hesitant, the problem is the advert, not the market. Fixing it is usually an afternoon of work, and in our experience it is the cheapest intervention available on a role that has been open too long.