Analysis: The first task for a would-be employee might be to sift through the jargon and waffle to figure out what exactly the job is
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By Chris Fitzgerald, Mary Immaculate College
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With the recruitment and retention of staff at crisis point in many industries, how organisations advertise jobs to potential candidates has become more important than ever to human resource departments. The language used by companies in job advertisements such as that above is designed to entice people entering the jobs market or those thinking of a career change to choose their industry and organisation over any other.
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Advertising by its nature incorporates sales and marketing strategies to achieve its aims. Job advertisements are no different. They aim to sell a product (a paid position) in exchange for the skills of a candidate. In trying to sell a position, companies try to sell what a 2012 study from the University of Sheffield described as 'a desired future state', an image of what their ideal future could be like.
There are common patterns to the structure of job advertisements that are derived from sales and marketing, starting with the job title. Just as a headline of a newspaper aims to persuade a reader enough to read on, job titles seem to be designed to be the bait that attracts candidates to a role.
Job titles can be vague and confusing enough to make it seem that anybody with any level of experience and qualifications may be eligible to apply. Could you be an Internet Assessor? How about a Process and methods project team member? On the other hand, some job titles seem to be designed to repel anyone outside of the industry to which they belong from even thinking about reading further. If the job title contains an acronym that you don’t understand (CX&D, AWF, MMC), you are probably not the right person for the job.
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The title is often followed by a job description that attempts to grab the audience’s attention by opening with a hook. This typical sales strategy is usually in the form of a question, such as these examples from popular online job advertising platforms: ‘Looking for a great way to earn extra cash while you are at home?’ ‘Want to be part of the customer service team for the No.1 electronics brand in the world?’ ‘Are you ready to make a career change and are you seeking a new and exciting challenge?’
Another tactic derived from sales and marketing is the use of the language of urgency and fear of missing out to insist that you will be left behind if you don't apply for this job. This is often delivered with emphatic imperatives such as ‘Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to work with a leading global construction consultancy company!’ or, ‘Grasp this opportunity to take your career to the next level!’ In some advertisements, the word ‘opportunity’ is used in place of ‘job’ or ‘position’.
Paradoxically, the attempts made by the writers of job advertisements to be creative with language and stand out from the crowd might be counterproductive. A 2017 study analysed job advertisements from the fastest growing companies in America. While attempting to sound different, the research found that they all sounded the same, with a tendency to be riddled with cliché, overuse metaphor and oversell positions that entail standard and commonplace duties.
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Organisations are ever conscious of how they are portrayed publicly. As public-facing documents, the language of job ads is often related to the brand and image of a company. This might mean using language that is cool, contemporary and likely to appeal to recent graduates. They use language that is akin to the slogans used by the brands in their dreamlike and ethereal vagueness. A job advertisement at one of the world’s most famous tech companies leads with the line ‘imagine what you could do here.’ You might be able to guess the company by reading that line.
Some of the descriptions of what employees will do in their posts seem to downplay the requirements necessary to perform tasks, while others describe posts as requiring the completion of tasks that are barely achievable. One post by the world’s leading online sales company says that the future employee will ‘own delivering’, ‘obsess over details’ and ‘evangelise content standards’. To ‘own’ a task is often used to describe having responsibility for something in a role.
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Language is an important consideration for recruiters trying to attract a more diverse pool of candidates. A recent LinkedIn report found that there are differences in how genders react to language used in job ads. While many sales agencies may use the word ‘aggressive’ to describe their approach to sales, this may be off-putting for females. On the other hand, females may be more likely to apply for jobs that advertise with terms related to character such as ‘likeable’ and ‘supportive’.
For those seeking a job, the good news is that there is a broad and diverse range of positions being advertised. When going through the jobs available the first task might be to sift through the jargon and figure out what exactly the jobs are.
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Dr Chris Fitzgerald is a postdoctoral Linguistics researcher at Mary Immaculate College.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
