A spinoff of this thread - what are the stupidest, most insulting, craziest, weirdest, or just plain dumbest job classifieds you’ve seen?
I mentioned mine in that thread - it was an advertisement for (example; may not be the actual place) Merrill-Lynch, and it read: “Must have extensive experience with LynchWorks™ accounting software.”
It was clearly their own in-house proprietary software - you’d have to already be working there to know that software!
(someone explained that it was probably just a formality and that it was for an internal promotion, but it’s still stupid to read something like that in the paper!)
Another one, which is really more of a category of clueless employer ads, was looking for someone to be an office manager for an office of 30 people, do payroll, scheduling, accounting, and purchasing, do fundraising and accounting of donations, and to design and maintain a new website for the company. That’s at least three or four seperate jobs, but the kicker is, you guessed it - “compensation is between $9 and $12/hr depending on experience.” :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
I used to see one in the Boulder Camera, and wished I had applied just to check it out- the last line of the job description was “must love the dog.” Sounded like a cool office to me!
A few years ago there used to be a classified ad that appeared every week in the “Sales Help Wanted” section of my local newspaper. I can’t remember it verbatim, but it was something like this:
WE’RE LOOKIN’ FOR SOME WILD & CRAZY GUYS ‘N’ GALS!!!
Oh yeah, girls just wanna have fun, and guys do too, so come have fun while earning a boodle of moolah!!!
The ad went on and on about fun and craziness and rock ‘n’ roll, but never said anything about what the job consisted of, or what kind of experience was required. A friend of mine, out of curiosity, called the phone number at the bottom of the ad and made an appointment for an interview (like the ad, the guy who answered the phone wouldn’t say boo about the job itself).
My friend went to the interview. The wild & crazy job consisted of telephone soliciting, trying to sell grotesquely overpriced light bulbs to senior citizens.
Sounds like my experience. Turns out the job was selling cheap-ass crap to people on the street. Literally, standing on the street, selling radios and shit to passersby.
I once saw a classified ad for a graphic designer, that took up almost three entire newspaper columns. They described the job in elaborate detail, including descriptions of every little task the person was responsible for. For example, instead of simply saying “Must know Photoshop,” they described all the tools and menus and file options, plus all the procedures the person needed to perform, like opening and saving files. They also described, in detail, the company’s dress code and holidays observed.
From my own experience these jobs are either a) Telemarketing as you said, b) Door-to-Door sales or c) Standing in a mall, harassing people as they walk past.
I used to sell classified ads. This type of employment ad was usually driven by some type of legal problem. I once had one (not quite as long as yours) for the tasks required of a cook at a Chinese restaurant. We also had one describing in detail what was involved in picking crabmeat from 6am-3:30pm all summer long in a chilled warehouse. I think that was advertised to demonstrate their need to hire immigrant labor.
The ones with no contact information typically mean some classified advertising salesperson is going to get chewed out big time. And rightly so. But it’s an easy mistake to make in the beginning when a customer reads you the text and doesn’t include any contact info, assuming you’ll use the billing address or whatever they were assuming.
My best blooper was a large ad that ran for Pizza Hut, hiring Divers. For that new, underwater pizza delivery available in coastal areas.
It wasn’t a classified ad, but it was through a headhunter. A company was looking for someone to spend 90% of the job answering phones and calming irate customers. The other 10% was writing SQL queries. But here was the catch – whoever took the job couldn’t be too “into” programming. They had to be an expert, of course, but couldn’t have very much interest in it. Oh, and it paid a whopping $40k.
I was a web developer back in the day (translation: 8 years ago). I remember some coworkers and I giggling over an ad that required candidates to have 7 years of experience with Javascript in 1998.
When I was looking for a job as a librarian, there was one in one of our poorer, more middle-of-nowhere counties. It had the normal requirements (ALA-accredited masters’ degree) and the job duties were something like - adult and children’s programming, acquisitions, processing, cataloging, administration, volunteer management, etc. Basically they wanted you to run the whole library, in exchange for which I suppose there was perhaps a cot in the back for the five minutes out of every 24 hours you weren’t working.
“must be willing to travel in small, single engine bush plane, skidoo, kayak/canoe, dog-sled and walk in snowshoes over treacherous terrain and sub-zero temps to remote Northern Communities”.
For a school administrative position for Frontier School Division (Northern Manitoba)
Sounds like the job my cousin has, principal at a school in a remote access community in Northern Ontario. I always wanted to try to ride there by motorcycle, the challenge being there’s no direct overland route in the summer.
Perhaps not precisely on point are job titles that don’t give you a clue of the nature of the work. When Mr. brown is looking for a job, I do the searches because I have more patience. He does AutoCAD and Archibus for facilities for biotechs, and using these words for search terms brings up some doozies.
I’ll never understand b.s. like that, or how many employers seem to think they can expect people with advanced degrees to work for less than $30k. I mean, did this “historic site” seriously think someone needed a Master’s to do landscaping? Whom did they eventually hire, I wonder? Did anyone with acollege degree of any kind even apply?
And it’s not like I think having a college degree is a license to turn one’s nose up at lower-paying work–how is one supposed to pay back $50,000 in college loans at a job that pays half as much as that?
I’ll bet this would actually be pretty effin’ cool . . . for a year or two.