Every advert submitted to RoleShift is read by a person against five tests. Adverts that fail do not go up, whatever they pay. This page publishes the tests, the wording that fails them, and the running count.
Most job boards will tell you they have standards. Almost none will tell you what they are, or show you anything they turned away. The standard is where the value of a curated board actually lives, so it should be visible rather than asserted.
Every advert is read against these. Failing the first one is fatal. Failing any of the others gets the advert sent back to the employer with the specific problem named, and it runs if they fix it.
Does it require prior experience in the field the role is in?
This is the one that matters most. A role that needs someone to already have done the job is not a career-changer role, whatever the title says.
Does the seniority in the title match the requirements in the body?
"Entry level" or "junior" or "trainee" at the top, then a list of things only an experienced person has, is the single most common contradiction in UK job adverts.
Is an actual salary or a real range published?
No figure, or a range so wide it means nothing, and the advert does not run. Candidates cannot make decisions about their lives against "competitive".
Does the employer say what they will actually teach?
"Full training given" on its own is not enough. What training, over what period, leading to what.
Are the qualifications genuinely needed for the work, or inherited from an old template?
A degree requirement on a role that does not need one filters out exactly the people this board exists for.
These are the phrasings that come up most often, and what is wrong with each. Nothing below is a real submission to RoleShift, because there have not been any yet. They are the standard patterns anyone who has read a few hundred UK job adverts will recognise immediately.
| Wording | Fails | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|
| “Entry level. 2+ years experience required.” | Title honesty, Experience | The two halves of the advert contradict each other. Whichever is true, the other is misleading someone. |
| “Junior role. Must be able to hit the ground running.” | Title honesty | "Hit the ground running" means no training. That is not a junior role, it is an experienced role at a junior salary. |
| “Salary: competitive” | Pay transparency | Tells the reader nothing, and research consistently finds it disadvantages people who are less confident negotiating. |
| “£20,000 to £45,000 depending on experience” | Pay transparency | A range that wide is not a range. A career-changer reading it has no idea whether they can afford to take the job. |
| “Full training provided. Proven track record essential.” | Experience, Training | You cannot offer full training and require a proven track record in the same breath. One of them is not real. |
| “Degree required (any discipline)” | Qualification | If any subject will do, the degree is not a skill requirement. It is a filter, and usually an inherited one. |
| “Looking for a self-starter who needs no hand-holding” | Training | A polite way of saying nobody will teach you anything. Fine for a senior hire, disqualifying for a role advertised as trainable. |
| “Ideal for a recent graduate” | Qualification | Not a rejection on its own, but if the role is otherwise open it gets queried, because it discourages the 40-year-old changing direction who could do the job perfectly well. |
A standard is only credible if it has edges. These do not fail:
Rejections are published as wording and reason, never as a company name. The point is to show candidates the standard is real and to help employers write better adverts, not to punish anyone for a badly worded first draft. An employer who fixes an advert and runs it has done exactly the right thing, and nobody will ever know they needed to.
None of the above is meant to be adversarial. Most adverts that fail these tests were written from an old template by someone who had five minutes, not by someone trying to exclude people. The fix is usually three sentences.
Replace "full training given" with what the training actually is and how long it lasts.
A real range, narrow enough to be useful. This alone widens your applicant pool.
Go through the list and strike anything the person could learn in the first month. Usually about half of it.
A hand-checked standard does not scale the way an automated one does. Every advert being read by a person is the reason this board can promise what it promises, and it is also the reason it will grow slowly. That trade-off is deliberate, but it is a real trade-off and worth stating plainly rather than discovering later.