What Job Adverts Actually Mean

A job advert has to attract you and commit to nothing, and the whole vocabulary lives in the gap between those two jobs. Forty-five phrases decoded, from competitive salary to other duties as required, each with the question to ask before you apply rather than after.

What is in it

• The years you could have been born, and what a house, a week of work and a pound actually cost in each of them.
• What has changed since, with the figures rather than the sighing.
• The honest bits about the age, written by somebody not pretending it is fine.
• Quizzes and things to argue about.
• Things you can now say and get away with.
• Around forty pages to fill in, which is the part that survives.

Formats and price

Part of What They Actually Mean, an Home Truths series.

Frequently asked

What does competitive salary actually mean?

It means they are not telling you the number. It is not a claim about the salary being high; it is the absence of a claim, and the honest response is to ask for the range before the first interview rather than after the second.

Is this cynical about employers?

No. Almost every phrase in the book exists for a reason, and several of them are the employer being careful rather than evasive. The book says which is which, because treating all of it as a con is as useless as taking all of it at face value.

Will it help me write a job advert as well as read one?

It is written for the reader rather than the writer, but the entries work in reverse. If you are advertising a role and every line of your advert appears in this book, the advert is telling candidates nothing.

Does it work outside the UK?

Mostly, yes. The vocabulary of recruitment is close to identical across English-speaking markets, which is why this is one of the two decoders where almost nothing needed changing.