Following up on my post about how to replace overpaid staff : I need to make a note about how I regularly criticise people in various companies for writing vacuous job descriptions. To begin, it should be noted the gamble is always whether to narrowly specify on deliverables, or to broadly hire types of people, and hope that the type can instantiate delivery of previously unspecified deliverables.
"Required Experience" : presuming the experience is actually relevant, it further assumes that the future behaves like the past - so not strictly necessary.
"Required Education" : usually this means "certification", but they obfuscate it. See "Required Skills".
"Required Skills" : now we're on to the crux of the matter ... experience and education may not guarantee relevant skills, but presuming you have skills, how relevant are those actually? Skills are abstract language to describe delivery capacity. Skills are theoretical, and once instantiated they are indistinguishable from "Required Delivery".
"Function of Job / Purpose of Job" : except where this refers to contextual information that qualifies "Required Delivery", this part is often fanciful storytelling.
"Other Desirable Qualities / Attributes" : see "Required Experience"
"Required Delivery" : this is the only field that really matters - however if your organisation has not the intellectual capacity to specify it, then you must do as others do and play guessing games about talent. May the odds be ever in your favour ...
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A large part of this phenomenon, I guess, stems from the industrialisation of education and professional expertise as commodified services. It would be interesting to do a thorough literary history on this, to get some economic data.
