Why Companies Don’t Tell the Truth on Job Descriptions Anymore

After reading this job description for less than 15 seconds, I had already spotted several lies, or to put it nicely, inaccuracies that someone lacking closer focus may miss. At the top of the page is the job advertised as a remote role, only to scroll down and see that this is clearly a hybrid work situation. This is one of the many common pieces of misinformation that job descriptions feed us constantly. In this video, we will walk through frequent lies that are told on job descriptions and how to spot them so that you don't accidentally pass up the right opportunities or waste your time on the wrong ones. And stay to the end because we will explore how to identify ghost jobs I'm Madeline Mann, a human resources professional turned job search strategist. You may have seen me in these places. I turn job seekers into job shoppers and be sure to subscribe to be reminded to do something good for your career working in human resources. I can tell you confidently that while job descriptions appear to be clear cut and dry documents that are well thought out, they are fraught with misinformation and ever changing details such as have you ever accepted a role? And once you start with a company, it is completely different from what you thought you were getting yourself into. Put it's happened to me in the comments, and if it has, because this happens more frequently than you may think. Hiring managers feel the pressure of the onslaught of so much work and therefore they hastily throw together a job description that they think makes sense and push it out into the world. What you're not seeing is that often each time the hiring manager has an interview, they may change what they're looking for slightly in their mind, but not update the job description such as I was once hiring for a chief operating officer role and with each interview the CEO would change his mind. Well, this person needs to have a software as a service industry background. Oh, and their background should be from sales. Actually, they should be from a big company. Wait, no, no. That's too big. It was dizzying to say the least. You can come into an interview that you think based on the job description. That is a remote leadership role focused on growing the sales team, when really you're interviewing for a hybrid leadership role that will be mostly working with the team, technical team, and all of that shifting happened behind the scenes without you realizing. Now there's also the curse of the purple squirrel that recruiters are often trying to convince hiring managers, these Elmer Fudds who are hunting for a candidate who does not exist, that they need to be less demanding with their Requirements it is common for hiring managers to want to hire someone with an impossibly wide and deep set of skills without realizing that that that person doesn't exist. And if they do, there aren't many of them. Take for instance the creator KG Codes, who points out a job description that asks for over seven years of experience for a coding language that was less than 7 years old.

Senior Mobile App Developer React Native Experience 7 plus years 7 plus years I'm supposed to have 7 plus years just came out in 2015. What I'm supposed to do work 2 jobs doing the same thing at the.

Same time and if you look closely at other job descriptions for newer skills, you can see this mistake pop up fairly frequently. While some of us simply laugh at the discrepancy and apply anyways, this can have damaging effects where mistakes like this can actually discourage qualified candidates from applying. A Hewlett Packard internal report stated that often men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women often apply only if they meet 100% of them. As Harvard Business Review dove into this famous statistic, they found that it wasn't so much that women are less confident than men and therefore wait until they are qualified to apply to a job, but instead because women are more likely to follow what they perceive to be the rules of the hiring process. And this is one of the many examples of if you are simply following the rules of the job search that you'll often miss out on the best opportunities. Which is why I always teach people how to go job shopping instead of job searching. There's so much to say here, but I'll link a free class below on job shopping strategies as well as a quiz you can take that will help you to develop a better job search strategy based on your personalized results. If job descriptions were accurate, then this gender difference wouldn't really matter because the female candidates who were fully qualified would only be compared to the other fully qualified male candidates, with the others discarded. However, this is not the case as companies frequently hire candidates who have less than the required experience. That is because a job description is a wish list. Hiring managers sit there dreaming like Lizzie McGuire, thinking up all of the different skills they would love to see in their new hire. They sometimes have the idea that they may draw a bigger pool of applicants because they are interested in a wide array of skills, though this ultimately ends up coming across as impractical. I have to say this for all of my HR brothers and sisters out there. Many people like to blame human resources for Terrible job descriptions. But expecting HR to write the job description is like expecting the waitress to write the menu. Sure, she can give it a shot, but she's not cooking the dang meal. It's really the chef, AKA the hiring manager, who should be approving the job description for accuracy. So take it up with the chef. If the details aren't correct, okay, the next lie you may see on job descriptions is the education requirement. When I worked in hr, hiring managers would automatically put an education requirement on their job descriptions. I would challenge them. I would say, if you found someone with the appropriate experience but they didn't have a degree, would you still interview them? Nearly always. They would say yes. I tell them, so this shouldn't be a requirement. Then you just said it's not required. More and more often, degrees are appearing on job descriptions as nice to haves versus required, which is a delightful change even for the ones that say required. If you are otherwise qualified, I say pursue it anyways. No longer is a college degree a proxy for job competency, and companies are recognizing that and interviewing candidates without degrees. There's also the strange experience of reading an incredibly vague job description and having no idea what you do in that role. This could be an indication that the company has no idea as well. They expect you to show up and figure it out yourself. I actually once applied for a job where they simply wrote that they were looking for help with HR and recruiting and invited people to email them. That was literally it. I emailed them. I still to this day never saw a job description. But I got the job. And it's true. I completely determined the duties and the scope of my job based on analyzing the needs of the organization. And while that may be your nightmare for someone like me, that kind of autonomy I thrive in. So it was actually a dream job for me. But also, companies may intentionally craft vague job descriptions to prevent competitors from identifying their strategic initiatives and key areas of focus. This tactic is more prevalent in industries where proprietary information is crucial. Take for instance, Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund management company that currently has a global portfolio of over $22 billion in assets. Key to their success are their black box formulas to forecast market fluctuations that are created by mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, and other specialized thinkers. You can tell from their job descriptions that they don't want any of their secret formulas to leak out through their hiring practices, as seen here in this research scientist role on their website. Much is left to the imagination as this description details one responsibility. No one is stealing the secret recipe from this kernel that's for sure. Possibly the biggest lie of all is that many companies who have job descriptions up are not hiring at all. These are called ghost jobs and they are incredibly common. A 2022 survey from Clarify Capital revealed that half of hiring managers keep a role open since they are always open to new people. Which is hilarious because they say, we are always open to new people. And you say, oh wonderful, perfect. I'm new people. And they go, ew, no, not you. And look at these other reasons they leave the job open to keep employees motivated, to keep the impression that the company is growing, to stay open to potential future candidates, and simply because they forgot to take it down. Needless to say, there are a lot of reasons that companies leave essentially fake jobs up. And with percents this high, odds are you have definitely applied to a ghost job or two in your day. Now my friend, if you've been around my coaching methodologies long enough, you know that I advise against applying online and relying on these job boards. And this video is yet another reason why I absolutely think your energy should go elsewhere. So be sure to subscribe to this channel and like this video, you've got this wi fi high five.