How to work out who wrote a job posting before your first message

How to work out who wrote a job posting before your first message

In a job feed you do not see a person, only text. But the text gives away plenty: what comes first, whether there are numbers, what the person is worried about. Below is a real listing worked through by its signs, and how a letter gets built from the type identified.

In a job feed you do not see a person, only text. But the text gives away plenty: what comes first, whether there are numbers, what the person is worried about. Below is a real listing worked through by its signs, and how a letter gets built from the type identified.

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You write to everybody the same way because you see text, not a person

The standard picture: you found ten suitable listings and wrote ten applications. The text is the same, only the first two words change. Two people replied, and you have no idea what separated those two from the other eight.

Then the conclusion is usually wrong: "the letter is bad, I need to rewrite it". You rewrite it — two out of ten again.

It is not the letter. Behind every listing stands a specific person with a specific way of making decisions. One needs deadlines and guarantees, another needs to be impressed, a third needs their team's life to get easier. One letter physically cannot land with all four.

And here is what matters: the markers sit right there in the text of the listing. No guessing needed, no call needed, no "reading people" needed. The person has already written everything about themselves — just not in the language you are used to reading.

How I know this

I take the job feed with a scraper: 848 listings over 24 days across 13 categories. When you read listings by the hundred rather than one at a time, the phrasings start falling into recognisable groups. Some people write "exactly 15–20 units a month", others "a strong creative team", and that is not style but a different way of thinking.

Below I work through not an abstract example but a real vacancy I applied to myself — and I show the whole analysis, including what is not in the text directly.

Tone and offer are not the same thing

The root mistake: people try to derive how to talk from what somebody sells or what job they do. A small business owner — so they economise. A marketer in-house — so it is about metrics. It works every other time, and it is unclear why every other time.

Because these are two independent characteristics.

What somebody needs is about the task. It determines what you offer.

How to talk to them is about temperament. It determines the language you offer it in.

Neither follows from the other. A cautious client trying something new for the first time routinely turns out to be a Controller: what they need is not an encouraging tone but a plan with dates. You give them reassurance and they go to whoever sent a table.

The second layer is hidden pains. In a listing somebody writes what they need. They almost never write what they fear. And fear is what they buy on: missing a launch, losing money, hiring the wrong person again. Whoever lands on the hidden pain in the first letter looks like somebody who has worked in that field — even if they have not.

A real vacancy worked through

Here is a listing I worked with. Irina, an online school, looking for a designer for the content team:

> "Looking for a creative designer for an online school's content team to produce stylish, engaging visuals. Tasks: thumbnails, video covers, laying out 15–20 carousels a month for Instagram and Telegram, in future designing guides and PDFs, occasionally banners for the cold traffic team. Requirements: a portfolio, especially social media design cases, a sense of style, knowledge of web design trends, strict adherence to deadlines."

The verdict: a Controller with a streak of Driver. Now by the signs.

What marks the Controller

A Controller is about figures and facts. Usually entrepreneurs and marketers: a cool head, cool calculation. Predictability means no less to them than creativity.

What marks the Driver

A Driver is about impact and metrics you can see: clicks on a thumbnail, completion rate on a carousel.

The hidden pains that are not in the text

Here is where the main work happens. From those same phrasings come three fears, none of which Irina wrote down:

Missed deadlines. An online school's content plan is tied to webinars and launches. A late cover means the traffic to a launch collapses. Hence "strict adherence to deadlines" in the requirements rather than the preferences.

The freelancer's creative block. She has no time to nurse a designer whose inspiration has gone. What is needed is a steady pipeline, not an artist with moods.

"Pretty but it doesn't sell." Designers drift into pure art and forget that text has to read on a phone and a thumbnail has to collect clicks.

Three fears, three ready arguments for the letter. And not one of them follows from the word "designer".

What to sell this client

To the Controller — time management: how your work is structured, that you are always contactable within the schedule, that stages get delivered early.

To the Driver — an understanding of social media: not "I can draw" but "I make visuals for click-through and completion".

Note: the set of facts about you does not change. What changes is what goes in the first paragraph.

All four types briefly

The typology I use was worked out by Sergey Molokov, a sales expert with six years in the profession who runs our sales module. It came out of years of negotiating rather than out of a book.

Driver. Energy, travel, team, goals, ambition. Leaders. They speak fast, loudly, crisply and dress boldly. Specifics do not particularly interest them — they look at the colour of the thing.

*How to speak:* on emotion, with a compliment, leaning on adjectives. A powerful project, a striking result, an energised team. A couple of jokes are fine.

Controller. Directors, investors, owners, managers. People of figures with cool calculation.

*How to speak:* correctly, precisely, to the point, no frills and no elevated language. Figures, facts, achievements, concrete prospects. A separate strong move is proposing a meeting in person: people like this prefer discussing things face to face.

Supporter. They live for others: family, children, animals, nature, volunteering. Often in a quiet, steady job, thinking of themselves last.

*How to speak:* on warm energy, starting with a question about them and the people close to them. What the project will give their family, their team, their people. And without fail, a reminder not to forget themselves, because they do.

Analyser. They do not decide quickly. Often IT, the exact sciences, anything requiring depth.

*How to speak:* facts, figures, materials. They will ask for statistics and detail — not to catch you out but because that is how they take the world in. Pressure is out. You agree when they will have looked at it and keep your word: they keep theirs and expect the same.

What to do when the type does not read

It happens often: a three-line listing with no markers. Then write as though to a Controller — deadlines, stages, specifics. That is the one tone that repels none of the four: a Driver will skim, an Analyser will approve, a Supporter will sense reliability.

And a technique for when somebody replies reluctantly: add arguments from another type to your next message. You may have identified them correctly but presented yourself wrongly. A type is a hypothesis, not a verdict.

And one more thing worth holding in mind. A type says nothing about whether somebody is a good person or a bad one, solvent or not. A Controller is not "tedious", a Driver is not "unserious" — these are simply different ways of deciding. The moment you start sorting clients into pleasant and unpleasant, you lose half the market.

How this gets done in a minute

You can learn to read listings with that eye — but it takes months of exposure, and applications have to go out today.

So I do not read them myself. I copy the listing whole, give it to the sales assistant and write one sentence: "here is a vacancy, analyse the client type". It runs a rapid analysis and produces a psychological portrait with the reasoning: which words identified the type, which hidden pains sit behind them, what to sell this person and with which arguments.

Everything you read above about Irina is its analysis. I did not even edit it.

From there the same request gets you a cover letter for that type, in your name. The cycle for ten listings is 5–10 minutes a day.

The sales assistant is one of more than 140 AI assistants across 14 categories on the platform: sales, marketing, creative, media, legal, HR, analytics, engineering. The same set will handle the job itself — those 15–20 carousels, incidentally, do not take a month.

And if you want to understand the typology yourself rather than only receive the analysis, the platform has a ten-lesson sales module where Sergey works through all of it: the four types, where to find each, handling objections, rejections, burnout, shaping an offer around demand and selling without case studies. More than five hours, and it is not a bonus attached to something — it is a full course.

Registration is free and opens three days of full Basic access — chats with every assistant, the sales module, the prompt texts and six foundational express courses including "Freelancer positioning".

Test it on yourself right now. Open the last three listings you applied to and find the words from this article in them: volumes and deadlines mean Controller, "creative" and "engaging" mean Driver, "our team" and "help us" mean Supporter, a described selection method and criteria mean Analyser. Then reread what you wrote to them.

The match usually turns up in one case out of three. That is the answer to why two out of ten replied.

If you know somebody who sends out the same text and cannot understand the silence, forward this to them. The text is probably fine.

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The critical fork: a client type is not a segment

The mistake that costs more deals than any other, and it happens to experienced people too.

These are two independent axes and you cannot derive one from the other.

The segment is why somebody came. What their task is. The segment determines the offer.

The type is how to talk to them. How they make decisions. The type determines the tone.

Why they get confused. It seems logical: somebody wrote about a fear of choosing the wrong contractor — so they are anxious, so speak softly and reassure them.

And that is a mistake. Somebody fearful by segment very often turns out to be a Controller by type. They do not need "don't worry" — they need a plan: what will happen, in what order, how long it takes and what is required from them. Soft phrasing reads to them as an evasion of specifics and puts them more on guard.

How to read both axes in one listing. The segment from what somebody writes about: what the task is, what is not working. The type from how they write it: sentence length, whether there are numbers, what comes first, what they are worried about.

The rule: determine them separately and do not derive one from the other.

And the other half: who you are writing to at all

The type answers "how to speak". That leaves "to whom" — and there is a ready list in the sales module.

Ten niches needing a deep audience analysis, each with its own need: online schools — what stops people signing up · coaches and consultants — which fears hold people back from buying · startups — audience needs for developing the product · small service businesses — competitive advantage through understanding the client · info-products — products that hit real pains · online shops — conversion at every stage · freelancers — sharpening how they state an offer · marketing agencies — making the advertising land · trainers and authors of physical products — a value proposition accounting for objections · financial and insurance companies — removing the fear of long-term commitments.

What they all share. The success of their business depends on the precision of their communication — which makes an audience analysis not an extra but something their revenue rests on.

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The series: one deal step by step

Eight pieces about one real deal — from a listing in a chat to the payment received. The client, Zakhar Fomin, owner of a dental clinic, gave permission to use his name and the figures.

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What to read next

[Four client types](/en/blog/four-client-types) — all four in full and where to find them.

[A cover letter with no portfolio](/en/blog/cover-letter-without-portfolio) — what an identified type turns into.

[Where to find AI work](/en/blog/where-to-find-ai-orders) — where the listings come from.

[The fifteen-minute client call](/en/blog/fifteen-minute-sales-call) — how the type changes the conversation.

[AI API pricing in 2026](/en/blog/llm-api-pricing) — what a request costs and how to work out your own costs.