In short: the facts in a job advertisement do not mean the same thing to different people. Managers, recruiters and candidates interpret work through their own profiles. Fit can only be assessed once the role has been broken down into real tasks, expected behaviours, ways of working, environment and energy cost.
The biggest problem with a job advertisement is not its polished slogans. The problem is that every person can only understand them through their own profile.
First: Triin Juurma, thank you for inspiring me to write this article.
Triin wrote on LinkedIn about “greenwashing” in employer branding.
“Great workplace culture.”
“Flexible working arrangements.”
“Competitive salary.”
“Plenty of development opportunities.”
If environmental claims will soon have to be substantiated, why should employers not have to do the same with their promises?
A very good question.
If we remove the attractive adjective, what fact remains?
But there is an even deeper problem.
Even when a fact remains, it does not mean the same thing to everyone.
A Fact Does Not Yet Give a Person Meaning
Suppose a company no longer simply writes “flexible working arrangements” but substantiates the claim:
“You can decide when and where you work.”
To one person, this means freedom.
To another, uncertainty.
To a third, it means nobody is leading.
To a fourth, it means they are trusted.
To a fifth, it means the working day never ends because they have to set all the boundaries themselves.
The fact is the same for everyone. Its meaning is not.
To one person, “great workplace culture” may mean frequent communication, shared events and constant collaboration. To another, great culture means the exact opposite: nobody interrupts them, meetings are rare and they can get their work done in peace.
One person wants frequent feedback from their manager. Another experiences the same behaviour as micromanagement.
One person wants decisions to be made quickly. Another sees that as superficial.
One person feels safe when everything has been agreed in precise detail. Another feels that the same environment gives them no room to think or take responsibility.
Who is right?
Both.
And this is where the real recruitment problem begins.
You Have Only One Profile for Your Entire Life
You do not know what you have not experienced.
And when it comes to another person’s way of working, you cannot truly experience it. You have only one basic profile for your entire life — your own.
You can learn the theory. You can listen to other people. You can develop empathy, practise different behaviours and become much more flexible over the years.
But you cannot swap out your nervous system for a day: your natural focus of attention, the way you use energy, the way you make decisions and the way you turn the world into meaning.
You can observe another person.
You cannot experience them from the inside.
You have to imagine the rest.
And you can only imagine it as far as your knowledge, experience and capacity allow.
This is nobody’s fault.
A well-adjusted person has learned to trust themselves. They have to. Without that trust, they could not make decisions, take responsibility or cope with life.
The problem begins when they start treating their own natural way of working as normal and every other way as a deviation from it.
We Do Not Consciously Look for Someone Like Ourselves
Most managers do not think, “I want to hire a copy of myself.”
They do not need to.
We simply recognise more quickly what we understand ourselves.
If a manager makes decisions quickly, a confident candidate looks strong to them. A cautious candidate may look uncertain.
If the manager weighs things carefully and at length, the same quick decision-maker may look superficial or dangerous.
If a manager thinks by talking, they like a candidate who can respond immediately. A person who needs time before answering may seem slow — even when their final answer is much better.
If a manager loves systems, they see disorder in a spontaneous person. If a manager loves movement and freedom, they see rigidity in a systematic person.
We call this gut feeling.
Gut feeling can be very intelligent. It carries years of experience.
But it is still the experience of a single profile.
A Job Advertisement Quietly Becomes a Portrait of Four People
I am close to finishing the aggregation of all major job vacancies in Estonia.
For a while, it was impossible to tell from the job title what work was actually being offered. Now it is at least a little easier to guess what lies behind the title.
We use AI to translate job advertisements into real work tasks.
Not from one language into another.
From the employer’s language into the language of actual work.
We have had to rewrite the prompts several times to extract at least seven distinct tasks from a single advertisement.
But nobody has a job so simple that they only do seven things.
The picture becomes even more interesting when we look at the kind of person employers want for those tasks.
The lowest number of different personality-profile expectations we have found in one job advertisement is two. Four or five is common.
Employers are looking for someone who is:
- fast, but always thorough;
- creative, but strictly process-driven;
- completely independent, but constantly collaborative;
- a bold decision-maker, but someone who always involves everyone;
- a big-picture thinker who loves routine detail work;
- a strong change leader who fits seamlessly into the existing system.
This does not mean that a demanding employer is looking for an exceptionally good person.
It often means they are looking for an inefficient solution.
They are trying to fit several different jobs, several ways of working and often several unresolved organisational problems into one person.
How Does an Advertisement Like This Come into Being?
Nobody sits down intending to write a bad job advertisement.
One person adds a quality they consider important in the role.
Another adds something the previous employee lacked.
A third wants the new person to fix an old problem in the team.
A fourth adds the company values.
A fifth copies a sentence from the previous advertisement because it sounds professional.
Nobody removes anything.
That is how one position is created that would actually require four people to fill.
And because every contributor uses their own idea of a good employee, the result becomes a contradictory ideal that no real person can sustain.
Should Writing a Job Advertisement for One Profile Be Easy?
You might think the solution is simple.
Let us write a job advertisement that looks for only one clear personality profile.
Nope.
It is very difficult.
The hard part is not only finding the right words. Before writing, you first have to understand which profile can actually do the work best.
To do that, a company must distinguish at least four things:
- what the person must know how to do;
- what behaviour is expected from them;
- which way of working helps them achieve the result;
- which part of all this fits their natural profile.
These are not the same thing.
A person can be very good at something even though doing it drains them. They can behave with complete professionalism even though it requires constant self-monitoring throughout the day. They can achieve an excellent result while paying an energy cost that nobody else can see.
A CV and an interview usually show whether a person can do something.
They do not show what it costs them to do it.
And that is where a large part of fit disappears.
Every Requirement Also Needs Translating
Demanding evidence for an employer’s promises is a good start.
But we must do exactly the same with the requirements placed on candidates.
“Good communicator” is not a requirement.
It is a heading that may cover ten completely different behaviours.
Does the person need to:
- connect quickly with strangers;
- listen and notice what remains unsaid;
- ask uncomfortable questions;
- explain complex things simply;
- defuse conflict;
- influence a client’s decision;
- tell their manager directly that their idea will not work?
All of these are communication skills.
Very few people are equally good at all of them.
We need to ask the same question about “stress tolerance”, “independence”, “flexibility”, “accuracy”, “initiative” and “teamwork”.
What observable behaviour proves that the person meets the expectation?
In which situation?
How often?
To achieve what result?
And from whose point of view?
If these questions have no answers, candidates are not being compared with the work. They are being compared with each assessor’s personal image of a good person.
We Are Used to Operating Inefficiently
The hardest inefficiency to notice is the one we have grown used to.
For years, a person may cover the gaps in their natural profile with learned skills, conscientiousness, discipline or another strong personal quality.
They are not helpless in the role.
Quite the opposite. They may be very good at it.
They simply have to work harder for the same result than someone whose natural way of working fits the task.
One person creates order because they naturally see the system. Another achieves the same order through constant checking, lists and strong self-discipline.
One person forms new relationships quickly because talking to strangers gives them energy. Another has learned to do the same thing professionally but needs time to recover after every meeting.
One person notices details automatically. Another maintains quality through fear of making a mistake and checks their work five times.
From the outside, their results may be equal.
The internal energy cost is not.
We call both competence and conclude that the work must therefore be a good fit.
But being able to do something does not mean it makes sense to do it every day.
High Performance Can Hide Burnout Risk
When a person must constantly push, suppress their natural way of working and move from one crisis to the next, their risk of burnout also increases.
Not because they are weak.
Because their good result is built on constant compensation.
Another person may complete the same work faster, with less internal struggle and with energy left at the end of the day. Not because their work is less valuable, but because the tasks use their natural capabilities.
Working in your element does not mean you make no effort.
It means the effort increases the result instead of being spent on constantly overcoming yourself.
The employer sees the result.
They may not see whether the person achieved it by using their strengths or by forcing themselves into shape every day.
If you only look at today’s result, the employee at greatest risk may even look like the strongest performer.
They take everything on. They do not complain. They learn. They work harder. They cover the gaps in the system.
Until they cannot.
Who Is Responsible for Burnout?
I have discussed with TalTech students who is responsible for an employee’s burnout.
In roughly two out of three cases, the first answer has been: the employee.
Ethically, there is truth in that. People are responsible for their own boundaries, choices and health.
But if a person does not even know themselves, leaving all responsibility to them is an unfair expectation.
How are they supposed to know that the work does not fit their natural profile if they have spent their entire life learning to compensate for gaps through effort?
How are they supposed to distinguish healthy development from constant self-overcoming?
How are they supposed to understand that a colleague completes the same task with less effort not because they work harder, but because they have different natural capabilities?
And how can an employee take informed responsibility when the company itself has not been able to describe the work they will actually do?
Responsibility cannot belong only to the employee.
The employee is responsible for learning about themselves, noticing their limits and speaking up about problems.
The manager is responsible for making the work understandable, keeping the workload reasonable and not judging a person’s fit only by today’s result.
The company is responsible for ensuring that people do not have to keep paying for organisational shortcomings with their personal energy.
To carry that responsibility, both sides first need information.
87% and 74% Are Not the Root Cause
87% of employees are dissatisfied. 74% of companies are dissatisfied with their recruitment results.
These figures are not two separate HR problems.
They are two consequences of the same phenomenon.
The employee starts the job with their meaning.
The company hires them with its meaning.
Both use the same words, but they are not actually talking about the same work.
A few months later, the employee says, “This is not what was promised.”
The company says, “They were not who they presented themselves to be.”
It is possible that neither side lied.
They simply did not know that the same sentence meant something different to the other side.
This is the root cause that better advertising, more candidates or another interview round will not solve.
We are trying to assess fit before we have created a shared language against which fit can be assessed at all.
You Cannot Compare a Person with a Job Title
The right person is not universally right.
They are right for specific tasks, in a specific environment, with a specific manager and specific people.
That is why the role must be taken apart before recruitment begins.
Not described at greater length, but genuinely broken into its parts:
- What result is expected from this person?
- Which real tasks produce that result?
- Which way of working helps those tasks get done well?
- Which tasks require opposing profiles?
- What must one person do, and what should be divided?
- What are the management style, pace, workload and decision-making freedom?
- Which profile is missing from the existing team?
- Which person already working in the company could actually do this work well?
Only then can a candidate be assessed against something real rather than against somebody’s imagination.
Sparkly Translates the World of One Profile into the World of Another
Personality-profile analysis is exactly how Sparkly can help recruiters and managers.
Sparkly’s purpose is not to say whether a person is good or bad.
There is no such answer.
Sparkly helps make visible what a manager, recruiter and candidate cannot naturally see from inside their own profile.
First, Sparkly makes the role visible:
- what the real work tasks are;
- which natural ways of working they require;
- where opposing expectations have been placed inside one role;
- what the team is like and what addition it actually needs;
- which promises and requirements need precise, substantive translation.
The person can then be compared not with a job title and slogans, but with the actual work.
Sparkly shows:
- which tasks come naturally to the person;
- what they can handle, but only at too high an energy cost;
- where they need learning, support or a different process;
- which tasks should be given to a person with a different profile;
- where conflicts emerge between the person, manager, team or environment;
- whether someone already inside the company is right for the same work;
- where a good result comes from natural capability and where it comes from constant compensation.
If four different profiles emerge from one position, the answer is not to find an even better superhuman.
The answer may be to redistribute the work, split the role in two, delegate some tasks, improve the process or leave the person with a core responsibility that fits their strengths.
This does not take gut feeling away from the manager.
It gives them a chance to see what their own profile does not tell their gut feeling.
You Do Not Have to Stop Trusting Yourself
People have to trust themselves.
Managers have to be able to decide.
Candidates have to be able to choose.
The problem is not trusting yourself.
The problem begins when we believe our experience is universal.
It is not.
You have one profile for your entire life.
Every other person has to be translated so that you can see them.
Not so that you stop trusting yourself.
So that you do not treat a different person as wrong simply because their strength does not look like yours.
Inspiration
Triin Juurma’s LinkedIn post about “greenwashing” in employer branding: LinkedIn conversation.