The Impossible Standard
The screen burns. Not literally, thank God, but the text is starting to fuse with my retina, flashing ‘competitive salary’ like a cruel joke. I scroll past the tenth listing this morning, a ‘Junior Creative Technologist’ role-a title that already implies two opposing gravity fields-and the requirement list unfolds like a medieval tapestry of impossible demands.
It’s not enough to master the Adobe suite. No, they require expert proficiency in seven, wait, nine distinct prototyping platforms, including that specific bleeding-edge framework that only achieved stable release 29 months ago. Five years experience, required. Does anyone even do the math? This isn’t a job description; it’s a ransom note written by a committee that accidentally locked itself in a conference room with a thesaurus and a subscription to Gartner’s Hype Cycle.
Insight: The Lie We Tell Ourselves
We tell ourselves that the job description is a ‘filtering mechanism.’ That’s a lie. It’s actually a defense mechanism for the hiring manager (Gary), terrified of looking bad to HR (Linda).
The Committee’s Ghost
Gary is terrified of hiring the wrong person because it reflects badly on him. So Gary tells HR (Linda) to throw in everything, including the kitchen sink and the neighbor’s dog, just to cover his bases. Linda, who is simultaneously managing 19 open requisitions, grabs the template from 2019, finds the nine buzzwords Gary circled, and hits ‘Publish.’
And suddenly, you need a PhD, the ability to levitate small objects, and extensive experience writing ETL pipelines for a salary that hovers depressingly near $49,999. It’s the ultimate failure of internal communication, translated into external demoralization. We are asking real people to compete for phantom jobs defined by aspirational fiction.
The Gap Between Aspiration and Reality
Testing Proximity, Not Competence
I watched my friend Fatima J.-M. deal with this from the other side. She didn’t look at the CVs; she looked at the filtering tools. During one sprint for a highly technical role, 239 applications vanished in less than a minute. Why? Not because they didn’t have the fictional experience. But because they failed to include one specific, niche keyword-an internal code name for a defunct project-that wasn’t listed anywhere in the public job description.
Fatima admitted it was a loyalty test disguised as a skill requirement. This is the core of the problem: we are testing for proximity to the inner circle, not for competence. And the result? Vast pools of talent sitting frustratedly on the outside, while companies perpetually complain about labor shortages. They haven’t found them because they haven’t described them accurately. They’ve described a unicorn built from the genetic material of three different animals that haven’t existed in 999 years.
The Unicorn Archetype
Five Years
In 2-Year Tech
Obscure Keyword
Loyalty Test
Depressed Salary
Near Fantasy Price
The Uncomfortable Admission
But here’s the uncomfortable admission, the contradiction I’m living with: I’ve done it too. I threw in irrelevant items, creating an internal signal, testing if the candidate understood the JD was a lie and treated it like a scavenger hunt.
The Game of Compliance
That person got the job-a $97,900 role. My mistake was thinking the filtering mechanism had to be honest. In this market, the JD is less about competence and more about compliance to an impossible standard.
2019
Template Creation
Present Day
239 Applications Lost
Shifting Focus to Translation
The real failure here is not the applicant who doesn’t meet the requirement. The real failure is the company that demands expertise beyond what is chronologically possible. They are hiring for a myth, not a teammate. And in doing so, they miss the vast, messy, brilliantly imperfect pool of candidates who could actually build the thing they need, if only they were given permission to apply without shame.
We need to shift our focus from validating the hiring manager’s paranoia to identifying the applicant’s potential for translation. Because that’s what this process becomes: the ability to translate a fictionalized requirements document (the job description) into the actual, necessary skills (the job itself).
The Value of Grounded Reality
They learned that the game is not about competence. It’s about communication. It’s about having the authority to say, ‘I know you asked for a unicorn with five years in that 2-year-old framework, but what you actually need is a reliable mule who can haul the weight and learn the rest in six months.’
This need for data-driven realism is exactly why I keep circling back to tools that actively try to inject data back into the equation, cutting through the emotional fog of big decisions. Instead of guessing, or relying on someone else’s fear-based checklist, we need mechanisms that provide actionable, localized truth. Ask ROB is one of the places trying to bridge that gap, forcing reality into the room by quantifying the variables we usually leave up to hope.
And if you can articulate that translation, you have not only won the job, but you have also done the company the ultimate favor: you have given them clarity they were too scared to find themselves. The job description is a defense mechanism, not an invitation. The question is, what happens when you treat that defense mechanism not as a requirement, but as the first data point in a negotiation?