Job Adverts Have the Same Problem as CVs

You’ve found an interesting-looking role.

The title catches your attention. The location works. The salary, assuming they’ve actually told you what it is, looks about right.

So you click.

And then you start reading.

“We are seeking a highly motivated individual with excellent communication skills…”

Here we go again.

What follows is a long list of responsibilities, essential requirements, desirable requirements, qualifications and years of experience.

By the time you reach the bottom, you might know what they’re looking for.

But do you actually know why you’d want the job?

A Job Advert Should Be an Advert

That sounds obvious.

But somewhere along the way, many job adverts stopped being adverts.

Instead, they became job descriptions published on recruitment websites.

There’s an important difference.

A job description primarily exists to describe a role: its responsibilities, reporting lines, expectations and requirements.

An advert has a different job.

It’s supposed to make the right person interested in the opportunity.

Think about almost any other form of advertising.

If a company wants you to buy its product, it doesn’t begin by giving you a technical specification.

It starts by helping you understand why you might want it.

Yet recruitment often does the opposite.

We Describe the Job Rather Than the Opportunity

Imagine you’re considering spending the next three, five or perhaps ten years of your working life somewhere.

What would you want to know?

Perhaps:

Why does this role exist?

What problem are you trying to solve?

What could I change if I joined?

Who would I be working with?

What does success look like?

What could I learn?

Where might this take me?

Why should I choose you?

Those are questions about an opportunity.

Instead, many job adverts give us a list of requirements.

Five years’ experience.

Degree preferred.

Experience in a similar industry.

Excellent stakeholder management.

Proven track record.

Ability to work independently and as part of a team.

The emphasis is overwhelmingly on what the candidate must bring.

There’s surprisingly little about what they might get in return.

Then Something Even Stranger Happens

You read the requirements.

And you change your CV to match them.

The advert says stakeholder management, so you make sure your CV says stakeholder management.

It asks for strategic thinking, so strategic thinking appears prominently in your profile.

It mentions a particular technology, methodology or industry, so you emphasise your experience of exactly that.

This isn’t dishonest.

It’s what candidates have been taught to do.

“Tailor your CV to the job.”

Perfectly sensible advice within the recruitment system we’ve created.

But consider what happens next.

The employer has written a generic description of the person they think they need.

The candidate rewrites their career history to resemble that description.

The recruitment system measures the similarity between the two.

And we call the result a match.

More Matching. Less Understanding.

This becomes even more problematic when hundreds of people apply.

Everyone has read the same advert.

Everyone knows what the employer says they’re looking for.

Increasingly, everyone has access to AI tools capable of rewriting their CV to emphasise precisely those requirements.

So applications become more similar.

Employers receive more apparent matches.

And distinguishing between them becomes harder.

The response?

More filtering.

More screening.

More automation.

More keywords.

More assessments.

We keep adding mechanisms to deal with the noise.

Perhaps we should be asking why we’re creating so much noise in the first place.

As we explore in our white paper The Future of Work Is Fluid, modern recruitment can confuse volume with insight. When candidates continually reshape their CVs around job specifications, differentiation becomes harder and employers increasingly fall back on proxies such as keywords, pedigree and familiarity.

Your CV Has the Same Problem

In our previous article, we argued that your CV isn’t inherently broken.

It’s simply being asked to do something it was never designed to do.

A CV is very good at recording where you’ve worked, the positions you’ve held and what you’ve done.

It’s much less effective at communicating your judgement, strengths, adaptability, reputation or potential.

The job advert has the same problem from the other direction.

It can describe responsibilities and requirements.

But it often struggles to communicate the reality of the opportunity.

So perhaps neither side is seeing the other particularly clearly.

The employer gets a CV.

You get a job advert.

Both are compressed versions of something far more interesting.

What If Employers Started With the Problem?

Imagine opening a job advert and reading something like this:

Here’s where we are.

Here’s what we’re trying to achieve.

Here’s what’s getting in our way.

Here’s why we’re looking for someone new.

Here’s what we’d love to have changed 12 months from now.

Here’s what it’s really like to work with us.

And here’s why we think this could be a brilliant opportunity for the right person.

Now you have something to think about.

You can ask yourself whether that problem interests you.

Whether your strengths could help.

Whether you’ve solved something similar before.

Whether the environment suits you.

Whether the opportunity takes you somewhere you want to go.

That’s a much richer assessment than asking:

“Do I meet 80% of the requirements?”

Employers Need to Make Their Case Too

There’s another assumption worth challenging.

Traditional recruitment tends to position the employer as the chooser.

The company has an opportunity.

Candidates compete for it.

The company decides who wins.

But good candidates have choices too.

You’re potentially offering an organisation thousands of hours of your life, your experience, your energy and your ideas.

It’s perfectly reasonable to ask:

Why should I choose you?

The best recruitment should therefore involve two parties trying to understand one another.

Not one side applying and the other side judging.

Both sides have something to offer.

Both sides have something they need.

And both sides should have the opportunity to choose.

Perhaps We’re Matching the Wrong Things

This brings us to a bigger question.

If a CV is an imperfect representation of a person…

…and a job advert is an imperfect representation of an opportunity…

why have we built an entire recruitment system around matching one against the other?

Perhaps we need to understand the person more deeply.

Their strengths.

Their evidence.

Their interests.

Their direction.

And perhaps we need to understand the opportunity more deeply too.

The problem that needs solving.

The outcomes that matter.

The environment.

The people.

The possibilities.

Then we can ask a much more interesting question than:

“Does this CV match this job advert?”

We can ask:

“Is there meaningful alignment between this person and this opportunity?”

That feels like a conversation worth having.

And it’s exactly the kind of conversation we believe the future of hiring should create.