Recruitment BS Dictionary

It’s fair to say in recruitment, there’s quite a lot of fluff, nonsense and outright lies. Experienced candidates are now becoming more accustomed to dealing with the BS that companies’ talent teams are throwing at them. And with the power of social media, more and more companies’ dodgy hiring practices are being exposed.

This is a great turning point in the movement to fairer, objective hiring practices. This transparency should help to force change in companies that still hire like it’s 1500.

So at Alooba, we’ve decided to take a lighthearted approach to this, and we’re putting together a bullshit dictionary for hiring.

The first version is the Company-Candidate version – an easy way for candidates to translate what the company is saying into plain English.

Feel free to reach out to us if you’ve got suggestions on what we should add to our dictionary!

‘Market-based salary’ = Below-market salary
‘Cutting edge tech’ = We use a lot of Excel
‘We’re after an all-rounder’ = We don’t know what we want or need
‘Your feedback matters to us’ = The form submissions go into an unmonitored inbox that the intern Jessy set up 7 years ago and nobody knows the password to
‘We’ll come back to you soon’ = You will literally never see or hear from us ever again
‘Fast-paced environment’ = We’ve got no idea what we’re doing but people look flustered and busy
‘We carefully reviewed your application and found you weren’t the right fit for the role’ = we either didn’t see your application at all, or someone (who likely has no skills or experience in this role) glanced at it for 5 seconds and clicked reject

Of course, hiring doesn’t have to be like this. If you’re ready for a more ethical & transparent approach, reach out to us.

Tired of the BS? Check out our no-nonsense ethical hiring guide

Tired of the BS? Learn more about modern hiring.

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Hear from leading Alooba customers who practice ethical hiring with Alooba

How can you accurately assess somebody's technical skills, like the same way across the board, right? We had devised a Tableau-based assessment. So it wasn't like a past/fail. It was kind of like, hey, what do they send us? Did they understand the data or the values that they're showing accurate? Where we'd say, hey, here's the credentials to access the data set. And it just wasn't really a scalable way to assess technical - just administering it, all of it was manual, but the whole process sucked!

Cole Brickley, Avicado (Director Data Science & Business Intelligence)

We get a high flow of applicants, which leads to potentially longer lead times, causing delays in the pipelines which can lead to missing out on good candidates. Alooba supports both speed and quality. The speed to return to candidates gives us a competitive advantage. Alooba provides a higher level of confidence in the people coming through the pipeline with less time spent interviewing unqualified candidates.

Scott Crowe, Canva (Lead Recruiter - Data)

I was at WooliesX (Woolworths) and we used Alooba and it was a highly positive experience. We had a large number of candidates. At WooliesX, previously we were quite dependent on the designed test from the team leads. That was quite a manual process. We realised it would take too much time from us. The time saving is great. Even spending 15 minutes per candidate with a manual test would be huge - hours per week, but with Alooba we just see the numbers immediately.

Shen Liu, Logickube (Principal at Logickube)

I wouldn't dream of hiring somebody in a technical role without doing that technical assessment because the number of times where I've had candidates either on paper on the CV, say, I'm a SQL expert or in an interview, saying, I'm brilliant at Excel, I'm brilliant at this. And you actually put them in front of a computer, say, do this task. And some people really struggle. So you have to have that technical assessment.

Mike Yates, The British Psychological Society (Head of Data & Analytics)