When you are posting jobs on job boards and websites, or emailing potential candidates from your hiring database with details of a new role your clients want you to find people to fill, it can be surprisingly easy to include buzzwords that are either worthless in convincing your target audience that this job is for them, or can actually be obnoxious and off putting. Nobody likes cheesy sales speak from businesses, and it is the same deal with job descriptions.

Here are some phrases you should steer clear of:

Buzzwordy Job Titles
Some people may think it is cute or creative to give their roles weird titles, or may make the jobs sound better than they are. What they actually do is confuse people, and prevent them from coming up in people’s searches. No matter how quirky the client wants their brand to sound, calling a developer a ‘code warrior’ or a QA person a ‘bug slayer’ is a) very lame, and b) will confuse both people, and search engines. Additionally, look out for job titles that are ambiguous about the seniority of the position and look to change that. A ‘lead tester’ could be the team leader of a small testing team with three people in it, on one project, or the head of the entire testing division of a software company. Sure, people can guess from the salary whether a job is at their level or not, but don’t make them. Call the job by the title that candidates would expect.

‘A Self-Starter’ Who Can ‘Hit The Ground Running’
There are several buzzwordy phrases that are redundant and annoying purely because literally everyone thinks of themselves this way in their professional capacity. If you are trying to communicate that the role will be very challenging with a steep learning curve and little support from management, then you need to find a way to say that that isn’t ‘we need a self-starter who can hit the ground running’ or similar. Every job wants this, and nobody ever reads it and says ‘well, I need constant hand holding so I won’t be suitable for this’. Talk about attributes that are specific, rather than generic ones everybody believes they have in sufficient measure to do the job that they do.

X Years’ Experience
Sometimes, to give an idea of how senior a role is, it seems to make sense to ask for an arbitrary number of years of experience in it. This is actually a bad idea, for a number of reasons. Sure, you might think eight years of experience as a development manager sounds good, but are you really not interested in someone with five to the point where you are telling them they don’t meet the prerequisite? Maybe the technologies your client uses haven’t even existed for eight years. Asking for proven, or extensive experience is generally better than sticking a minimum arbitrary limit in time on it.

These are just a few things that you can make your job ads and emails look more appealing by avoiding.

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Sales Phrases to Avoid When Advertising for Candidates