Job posting
Also called job description, JD, job ad.
The employer's public description of a role — part specification, part marketing, and rarely a literal list of requirements.
A posting is usually assembled from three sources: what the hiring manager needs, what HR's template requires, and what was in the last posting for a similar title. That's why requirement lists run long and why they're internally inconsistent — six years of experience with a framework that's four years old is a copy-paste artifact, not a filter.
Read it in order of information value. The day-to-day responsibilities are the most honest section, because someone had to describe real work. The "requirements" section is negotiable. The "nice to have" section is where the differentiators hide, and it's frequently where the hiring manager's actual preference lives. The team and reporting structure, when stated, tells you more about the job than the title does.
Postings also leak information about the company. Salary bands where they're legally required, a stale posted date meaning a stalled or evergreen requisition, and language about pace and autonomy that is more revealing than the culture paragraph beneath it.
Evergreen requisition
A permanently open posting used to collect candidates for a role the company hires continuously — or isn't hiring for right now at all.
Keyword optimization
Using the employer's own vocabulary for skills and tools you genuinely have, so you appear in the searches a recruiter runs.
Resume tailoring
Rewriting an existing resume for one specific posting so the relevant experience is the visible experience.
Knockout question
An application question whose wrong answer removes you from consideration automatically, before any human review.