Worst job adverts

Worst job adverts

I've seen some pretty awful job adverts in my time as I'm sure we all have, and thought it might be amusing if we recorded some of the best/worst (depending on your viewpoint). There are various types that have their own characteristics, I have some favorites.

The ones where the advert was clearly written by either an HR drone or the recruitment agency, with zero understanding of the subject matter. This has sub-categories of requiring impossible experience, or consisting of a long list of buzz words and not much else.

Those where the employer wants someone with a very mixed bag of unrelated skills like 1st line help desk, project planning and technical DBA/application support. The 2 main reasons for this are a) they are too stingy to pay for 2 people to do 2 unrelated jobs or b) they had someone who for whatever reason picked up lots of unrelated bits & pieces over the years and the employer then demands a clone of that person.

The advert is so very specific that whoever wrote it has one particular person in mind, so they wrote the advert to suit that person - I call this "the MD's nephew" as much of the time the chosen person is a relative of someone with clout.

Adverts where the rate/salary quoted is so incredibly low compared to typical rates for that role that you know the employer really has no sense of reality at all. There can be a number of reasons for these adverts e.g. there was someone doing the job for years, who took on higher level work but never received promotion or a decent pay rise, or the accountants think that a fair contract rate is to take the annual salary and divide it by the number of working days in a year (this is common with public bodies. Or those who just think that in the current economic climate they can offer half what was the going rate (or less) and still get good quality candidates.