Reqspeak: A Field Guide to the Dialect of the Job Ad

A single job advertisement is projected and translated line by line, in the manner of a field linguist working on a language whose speakers insist it is plain English.

The claim#

An advertisement is not one document. It is four, stapled together by somebody under time pressure, and they were written by different people for different readers.

1. Legal and system boilerplate, present because a template demanded it. It tells you about the organisation’s processes and nothing about the role.
2. The wishlist, assembled by asking several people what would be nice. No candidate has ever met it. Applying at sixty per cent of a wishlist is not presumptuous, it is the design intent.
3. The work, which is the two or three sentences describing what happens on a Wednesday. Short, boring, and the only part your materials must answer.
4. The confession, which nobody meant to write.

Reading the fourth document#

The confession is where the last hire’s failure leaked into the text. A phrase appears in an ad because something happened. “Must be comfortable with ambiguity” means the work is not specified and nobody is going to specify it. “Self-starter in a lean team” means you would be the only one doing this. “A strong communicator who can push back” means somebody accepted too much work and burned out doing it.

None of these is a reason not to apply. They are the questions you ask at the end of the interview, phrased as interest rather than as accusation, and asking one well is the single cheapest way to look like somebody who has done the job before.

Why this is not cynicism#

Reqspeak is not a conspiracy; it is what happens when a role gets described by committee. Reading it properly makes you kinder to the ad, not harsher — you stop reading the wishlist as a judgement on yourself, and you start answering the two sentences that actually matter.

Afterwards#

Take one advertisement apart into these four columns in this week’s teardown. Bring the ad you want, because the teardown becomes Dossier §3 and you will be living with it until week 12.