How to experience a job advert. Jobseeker Basics XIX

Greg Wyatt • March 2, 2026

This might seem a weird chapter.

Surely you look at a job advert, maybe even read it, then decide to apply or not?

Yet a job advert is more than just what's presented on a job board.

It's a microcosm of everything in recruitment, including everything wrong, and you can learn a lot about what to expect in your job search by the least intentional of words.

And when you do read a job advert, in its entirety, there are only two questions you should ask of it:

Am I qualified?
Should I be interested?

It's somewhat odd that 99% of job adverts don't actually try and help you answer that.

But maybe that's why employers say job adverts don't work.

And why you don't think they do either.

While you're here, why not check out A Career Breakdown Kit in its entirety?

This series of always free chapters is an advert, after all.

But it was never supposed to be an easy book to read, just accessible and comprehensive.

I expect most readers are over 50, ND, or other marginalised demographics, considering these will likely be the longest out of work in our 'diverse and inclusive' world.

If you're 'in demand' though, you'll probably click apply and wonder what the fuss was about.

44 - How to experience a job advert

This chapter is about job adverts, what they are and aren’t, how you might experience them, how they might inform your decisions and your responses.

I say experience rather than read because not all adverts are written or read.

What’s a job advert?

A job advert is the first step in a multichannel commercial approach to filling a vacancy. It’s the inverse of your job search taking a multichannel, through-the-line approach - we go where the candidates are.

It’s the first step because it’s the first thing you experience of that vacancy irrespective of whether it’s a:

Listing on a job board
A post on social media
A DM from a recruiter
A phone call from a hiring process
A referral
Or any other means by which you become aware of a vacancy

Each of these is a marketing or sales channel that may result in a candidate's application.

It’s regrettable employers don’t necessarily see it this way because of the transactional nature of much recruitment process.

They think it’s sticking a job posting up on LinkedIn.

Employers forget that when you experience such an advert you first make the choice to entertain that advert rather than a yes or no to ‘Should I apply?’

Indeed much advertising neglects the psychology of a job move, which principally relates to problem awareness.

How you experience an advert, what may encourage you to progress an enquiry and what you are prepared to put up with in the process relate to your situation and the problems you currently face.

Are you out of work, needing any job to pay the bills?

Are you in work, desperate to escape a toxic culture?

Are you gainfully employed yet wouldn’t mind a bit more flexibility to pick the children up from school?

Are you apparently smashing it, with that missing something you don’t even know about, and the right vacancy might improve your lot?

And everything in between.

The answer to these questions informs your experience of any advert.

Because many employers don’t consider what informs an experience and think people would be lucky to work there, it’s rare that more than the minimum acceptable skill will be applied to an advert.

As discussed in Better use of job boards, the emphasis is on more rather than better. It’s often thought that ‘if we can reach more candidates, we might fill the job.’

Rather than appeal to the right people for the right reasons.

And so we are in a market where an advert attracts hundreds if not thousands of applications, most of whom are wholly unsuitable.

What isn’t a job advert?

A job advert isn’t a fake job, although many of these are listed.

They aren’t Job Descriptions either - the next chapter explains why this distinction is important.

While you may spend much time perusing job boards and talking with fellow job seekers, reading their posts on LinkedIn - I’d expect most employers have little awareness outside of their own sphere of what happens in the job seeker community.

They’ll advertise how they advertise, instruct agencies how they instruct agencies and run their process how they run their process.

I wonder how many great employers use Workday as an ATS, fill their jobs suitably, and have no knowledge of how Workday is viewed by job seekers who have dozens of Workday accounts, one per application?

It’s true terrible employers might do the same.

In one of my job advert consultations I had a detailed conversation with a Talent Acquisition Manager of a local technology consultancy. I can say that they are a jewel in the crown of technology development in the UK, have top 1% compensation, offer career development, and are a fantastic place to work.

I know this because I have spoken to many people who have worked there. All speak highly of them.

Yet the advert we reviewed had a number of red flags:

£Competitive salary
Generic company first text
Confusion around job titles

If you were an ideal candidate who decided not to apply because of these red flags you’d have missed out.

There are two considerations in how an advert might be put together.

The first is whether it is a product of a transactional process or whether the hiring team recognises potential candidates are driven by selfish reasons and seek to understand ‘what’s in it for them.’

(I’ve mentioned WIIFM (What’s in it for me) a few times now - answering that is key to good marketing)

The second is the direction of travel - are you reading a job board advert or have you been contacted proactively about the vacancy?

A transactional process is defined by information transactions with a focus on speed and volume.

It places less emphasis on qualitative measures such as accuracy, specificity, relationships, and empathy.

Instead you can define the process by a series of information transactions and exchanges:

Job description
Advert
Suitable number of relevant applications
Suitable number of interviews
Offer
Starter

The goal is to fill a vacancy.

A non-transactional process recognises the importance of relationships and that to build trust the right information needs to be put forward.

Though the steps are much the same, at each stage the question is asked: ‘Does this give the candidate the right information to make an informed decision?’

Here a candidate is everyone who interacts with the vacancy outside of the hiring end - even a reader who chooses not to apply.

The goal is to create a process that draws the right person forward while leaving everyone with a good experience.

It’s not just about decency - it’s about long-term commercial outcomes.

If you want the right person to thrive over the long term the process has to reflect this goal.

While all the ‘nos’ might be commercial opportunity in future - future candidates, future customers - who knows?

These are the archetypes. In reality, recruitment falls somewhere along this spectrum, often changing at different stages in the process.

Intent matters even if the execution is flawed.

Why does it matter?

Because a healthy rule of thumb is to reciprocate the level of care you experience.

If you come across a transactional process - treat it transactionally. This isn’t inherently bad - it’s just the way of the process.

The employers may still be good to work for.

When and whether to apply

Irrespective of how a role is recruited, there will be non-negotiable essential criteria that inform whether or not you are suitable.

If you can establish these criteria you can confirm whether to apply.

The problem is these criteria aren’t always stated.

Sometimes they are implicit to the context - if the role is employed by a rapidly growing scale-up, it’s likely they’ll need someone with that experience.

Hopefully this context is alluded to in the advert. It will need critical thinking to parse.

Sometimes these aren’t defined at the outset and become mandatory when there are too many candidates in view.

Sometimes these are hidden by Goldilocks or illegal discrimination - not too experienced, not too inexperienced, not too old.

Sometimes the employer can’t divulge essential criteria.

The other problem is that some essential criteria aren’t essential, such as when a company writes unrealistic shopping lists.

Yes, it’s a FUBAR situation given it’s pretty hard to tell whether you’re a suitable candidate or whether you should even apply.

Nonetheless - if you choose to apply your application must show how you can meet any essential criteria you can identify.

If that’s the only thing your application does - it must do this.

In my experience, transactional processes are the hardest to unpick, with adverts going something like:

Here at genericorp we are proud to be recruiting for a <job title> in our market leading innovative environment.

You’ll be doing

You’ll need

In return you can expect a £competitive salary.

Apply with a full cover letter and updated CV.

Only successful candidates will be contacted.

Familiar?

Whereas the rare non-transactional adverts give more of a narrative about why the right person might think to apply or give you avenues for finding more information.

A note on inbound enquiries.

With automation allowing volume outreach the effort to produce transactional DMs, emails and messages is pretty low.

You might think when you receive such a message that you are already in the running - in many situations you are a transactional prospect.

I’ve even heard some recruiters InMail #OpenToWork profiles only to improve their response rates.

While not all messages are this way these are potential reasons you might not hear back when you reply to a recruiter.

It’s not quite the case with phone calls which have yet to be executed through automation (some platforms promise AI call automation already).

Again, you can separate transactional from non-transactional straightforwardly.

Transactional leads with selling the job.

Non-transactional seeks to explore if you are the right candidate. If the vacancy isn’t right it’s best to find that out as early as possible and save everyone time.

Inbound enquiries are still adverts, in a different medium.

Try not to treat your job search transactionally by default.

Your goal isn’t to apply for hundreds of jobs. Your goal is to start conversations that count.

By prioritising adverts in the right way you’ll improve your odds with high stakes applications. You’ll gain time and energy for other activities, including taking time away from your job search to recharge.

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Salary on the job description

By Greg Wyatt • November 11, 2026

I've written many variations on the article below, over the years, and it seems sensible to revisit given the UK government's announcements around salary transparency. On the whole, I'm for it, with the many advantages it brings. But like a lot of things in recruitment, there is a more involved discussion to be had, especially when this fix treats the symptoms, not the rot. That's not to say the fix isn't worth doing, just that it won't fix many of the problems underlying a lack of transparency. This article is a little dated, in terms of the research shared, but I think the points are as relevant as ever. Originally published May 2023 Salary on the Job Description? Yes, the headline is trolling. The question should be ‘salary on the job advert?’ You wouldn’t confuse a job description with an advert, would you? This is a subject rife with disagreement around ethics and practicality, and worth broaching again considering recent campaigns in the UK to increase salary transparency and ban the ‘what’s your current salary?’ question. Let’s focus on some practicalities first, based on UK research I ran last year for my “Accessing a Candidate Short Market” guide: Job boards can penalise you for not listing salary. As of December 2021, Totaljobs penalises adverts that don’t list salary, and these aren’t sent out as job alerts to candidates (who may be passive). These adverts are considered sub-standard. Unlisted salaries attract fewer qualified applications. This was estimated to be between 20% and 45% fewer, across the job boards I talked to. LinkedIn reported that not only can you expect more applications, you may also expect better-qualified applications when the salary is advertised. My work supporting senior job seekers confirms this - many would not apply to adverts that had no salary or "competitive salary" because they felt this was a waste of their time. There is less emphasis on salary negotiation from the candidate side, due to transparency in pay. This is a key part of equity, relating to gender, race and intersectional identity. According to Payscale 's research, white men are most likely to negotiate the highest salary. It’s simple – if you advertise vacancies and don’t list salary, you risk receiving fewer, less suitable applications. Then there’s the ethical question, where a common argument is that there is ‘no ethical reason that salaries can’t be listed’. Now, while I’m a proponent for advertising salaries, where possible, I think this ethical argument isn’t the right one - ‘can’t be’ is a strong statement. I think a better question is ‘how does this do harm’ when establishing reasons for not listing salary. This balances pragmatism with the most important aspect of ethics. It can be a complicated question too in scenarios like this: How do you establish salary transparency for job families across multiple regions where the local pay is established by HQ in one country? Currency exchange rates and cost of living mean that a fair salary one day may not be the next, therefore flexibility in not listing salary may be ethically the right thing to do if the intent is right. What about new vacancies that serve to solve a business problem and can be recruited at different levels? What about practical situations like recruiting hard-to-fill vacancies during a wider redundancy programme, whereby listing a salary would create concern in unrelated areas of that unsettled business? It's not always as simple a question as we’d like to think. If you’re facing a complex situation in advertising a role, I recommend describing your stance in the advert itself, if you legitimately can’t state the salary. At the same time, as we’ve seen in the US, legislation to enforce salary transparency creates situations such as Netflix apparently advertising a range of $90-900k. Who does that help? The problem with this kind of legislation is that companies can comply while continuing the behaviour that led to the legislation in the first place. It’s palliative, rather than treating unfairness at its root. We should also consider the unforeseen consequence of salary transparency, such as this research which appears to show a reduced link between performance and pay: Influence of Pay Transparency Helping candidates negotiate better pay or terms is a privilege I enjoy. And there's more to understanding someone's existing remuneration than simply establishing whether they can afford to move. Sometimes these conversations reveal that someone is being underpaid. With evidence of what their experience and contribution might command elsewhere, they can go back to their current employer and make the case for a pay rise. That might mean they decide not to move at all. Which is a perfectly good outcome for them, even if it isn't for the vacancy in the short term. It also opens up the counteroffer conversation early. If their employer could resolve the reason they're considering leaving, I'd rather understand that before they accept an offer elsewhere. There's a benefit for prospective employers too. A new employer may budget £52,000 for a role, believing that to be market rate, based on historic data. But if conversations with suitably experienced candidates reveal that their existing remuneration, expectations and other opportunities consistently indicate otherwise, there's good reason to revise either the budget or the requirements. If that budget does prove unrealistic, and it's the same budget other team members are measured against, it can also create the argument to revisit everyone's salaries - subject to affordability, of course. After all, it's cheaper to retain fairly paid staff with all the knowledge they have than to replace them. Of course, conversations with candidates aren't a substitute for proper salary benchmarking. But they can reveal problems that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. There are also situations where understanding the whole package matters. What if someone currently receives a 16% pension contribution and moves to a role offering a 10% pay rise but only a 5% pension? Car allowances, RSUs, tax-efficient packages? Remuneration is a more involved conversation than simply salary. And none of this means someone's existing salary should determine what they're worth to their next employer. If their previous salary was unfair, using it to determine their next salary risks perpetuating that unfairness. And if an employer routinely offers a 15% increase on previous earnings, the new salary may have little relationship to the contribution that person can make. It makes sense to pay commensurately with contribution and capability, rather than what may be irrelevant history. So I understand the reasons for wanting to ban questions about previous salary. They're often used badly. But I think there's an important distinction between asking to establish someone's worth and asking to understand their circumstances. One can perpetuate unfairness. The other can help identify and correct it. If legislation restricts these conversations, I'll adapt how I offer this support. But I'd hope any restrictions recognise the difference between using salary history to determine an offer and voluntarily discussing remuneration to help someone make better decisions. I hope you’ve found these thoughts helpful to start a broader conversation in your business. My thoughts aren’t set in stone, so please let me know your opinions if you disagree. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services: Commercial, operational and technical leadership recruitment Manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client Outplacement support Email me on greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk if you'd like to discuss.

Tone deaf - No problem, pt 6

By Greg Wyatt • November 5, 2026

It's interesting revisiting this article from 3 years ago, especially now AI products are more embedded in market. If anything my view on AI is more polarised, bringing many new opportunites, brand new problems, as well as the existential angst many are talking about. For me, codifying my experience with AI tools means I can help more people, while freeing up my time to do more human work. It's certainly helped with job seeker support, and increasingly so in my recruitment work. Mainly it's giving me more time to talk to people, and when homogenous AI applications at scale are one new problem, as well as the increasing threat of deep fake interviews, in person conversations might be a necessary exnovation (just googled that - what a great word that I will now abuse at scale). While the article below has dated somewhat, I think the threat it assesses has never been more pertinent. I've said for some time that AI might be the death of knowledge and judgement, even so far as 'meaning', something that this recent research also indicates . Importantly the research doesn't say the recommendations were wrong, just how they were followed. Read that article and think about how AI recommendations on applications relate. I've certainly found them more problematic, so far, than the old school ATS style ranking and filtering - because of the false confidence they convey, especially when dealing with non-traditional applications. Things may improve, or so is promised. And while words might be the first facility of LLM, they are still the core facility, given all it does is determine the most probable answer in its outputs (I know I'm being reductive, some of the developments from AI are amazing). Whereas words should be the consequence of thoughts, lead to the development of thought, and distil ideas in a way you can act on. Much like job adverts should be the consequence of effective job analysis, rather than a polished word that lacks meaning. The greatest risk for me in recruitment isn't so much the answers AI offers, but that we become so reliant we forget to ask better questions. I've edited down the previous article, but if you're curious, you can see it here . September 2023 I’d commented about my hearing on a social media post on deafness. ‘Have you looked into these hearing aids - they’re designed to overcome head shadow’, came the impromptu reply from a hearing aid specialist. Head shadow? Not a phrase I’d heard before, despite having no hearing on one side, which effectively creates a sound-free shadow to my right. See, when I had mumps at 18 months it killed the vestibulocochlear nerve in my right ear and damaged the one on the left. But it was my balance that showed the nursery assistants that something was wrong - I kept falling over for no reason. I expect they thought my slow response was normal naughty-boyness. Balance, intermittently poor audio processing, energy required to maintain attention in noisy environments and that bloody tinnitus - all these issues are far more annoying than not being able to hear in one ear. That and not being able to tell where sounds come from. “Over here, Greg!” is the most useless call on a football pitch. And the head shadow thing? Well, it’s never been an issue - I just turn my head when in conversation. It might look like I’m turning to kiss you, but it’s just a conversation I want honest. Sure I miss out on certain audio cues, but it’s rarely an issue. Anyway, curious as I am I looked into the £4,000 hearing aid that solves head shadow by placing a microphone on the deaf ear and projecting it into the the good ear. Quite the brute force tech solution and one I’m sure some benefit from. But the key issue is one of reverb. While the product is good, it would impact the quality of sound in my good ear, which seems a pointless trade-off for me, when my process of life is more effective than shiny tech. It’s ironic that I consider myself highly excitable when it comes to technology developments, yet I’m never an early adopter. Because I always ask myself, other than giddiness, what problems does this solve and how will it enhance my life. And so it is for AI in recruitment, and the shininess of tech in general. They are positioned as solving problems, and indeed they do, but in many cases, it’s the wrong problem that detracts us from the real opportunities for better processes. Simpler administration, speed and scale are clear benefits. And some of these AI-branded automations are excellent. The Star Trek-style auto-translator makes me giddy. As does the sales bot conversation-as-a-human sales video that’s doing the rounds. But AI for writing? What problem does that solve? For me, it depends on what you consider sales to be. Is sales pitching a generic message and hoping someone will bite? Or is sales laying out the facts so that the right person can reach an objective decision? A decision which might mean getting in touch, or changing their view on what needs recruiting. For the former AI writing seems to solve a problem. The words are certainly better, but the message is even worse. Yes: prompting. But if you can prompt the right message, why aren’t you just writing it, so that you embed that knowledge for use across other mediums - conversations, meetings and so on? While AI writing does not meet the requirements for the second type of sales. You can only do this by establishing the right facts from a briefing, consultation or interview. Then interpret this with meaning to the right people so that it creates the right impact. Sales as data visualisation, if you will. And if AI doesn’t work for sales in this way, why would it work for content or marketing? I think the answer depends on whether you value contextual insight or not. Until AI is better at asking questions that create meaningful conversation, it’s a non-starter for me. I say until because this hesitation will be moot in the next year or so. Because it isn’t what AI is now that’s the opportunity - it’s what’s coming soon. I can’t wait to see what’s next. Until then, AI, for writing, is a question of in one ear and out of the other. Which, if you’re deaf in the one, is quite the problem. Go learn copywriting instead, and listen to how it transforms your approach to recruitment. Then layer tech on top, when it’s ready. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. If you like good recruitment and you need help with it in the UK, drop me a line. DM on LinkedIn, email greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk , whichever you prefer.