“We want to hire a ninja.” Why, are you planning to assassinate the competition? Will this ninja scale the walls of your WeWork at midnight, clad in black polyester-blend business casual, to silently eliminate inefficiencies? Or is it because actual job descriptions require thought, and “person who does work” lacks the mystique you’re going for? Here’s a radical idea: hire a professional. They show up on LinkedIn. They have résumés. They don’t disappear in a cloud of smoke when you mention health insurance.
“Or a rockstar.” Ah yes, because what every quarterly earnings call needs is someone who trashes hotel rooms, shows up three hours late, and has a rider requiring seven kinds of artisanal coffee. You want a rockstar because they have access to the best drugs? Bold strategy. Nothing says “synergy” like someone whose previous gig involved lighting a guitar on fire and stage-diving into a mosh pit of liability lawsuits. If you actually wanted a rockstar, you’d be hiring someone unreliable, chemically adventurous, and prone to mid-meeting solos. You don’t. You want someone who works unpaid overtime without complaining. Call it what it is.
“Or a Sherpa.” Because nothing says “we value expertise” like comparing your employee to someone whose job is to haul your baggage up a mountain while you take selfies at base camp. Yes, we’re climbing a mountain of debt, and we need someone to carry it all while we sip oxygen and pretend we summited on our own. Never mind that actual Sherpas are highly skilled mountaineers with generations of knowledge. You just want a pack mule with a college degree. At least be honest: “Wanted: Someone to shoulder our poor decisions while we LinkedIn-post about leadership.”
“I’m the kind of person who thinks outside the box.” Congratulations, you and 47 million other people on LinkedIn. So many people think outside the box that the box is now empty, gathering dust in some metaphorical warehouse of abandoned ideas. Meanwhile, I’m over here looking for someone who thinks inside the box, because that’s where the genuine unorthodox thinking lives now. That’s the blue ocean. That’s the disruption. Show me someone who can look at a box and say, “You know what? This box is actually pretty well-designed. Let’s use it correctly.” That’s innovation. That’s courage. Everyone else is out there in the wilderness, pretending their half-baked brainstorm is revolution, while the box sits there, structured and reliable, waiting for someone with the guts to admit that boundaries sometimes make things better.
“We’re a family here.” Ah yes, the kind of family that pays you to attend Thanksgiving and fires you on Black Friday. The kind that posts heartfelt tributes to work-life balance while expecting you to answer Slack at your actual family’s dinner table. Here’s the thing: no one with stock options should ever say this unless they also plan to adopt you, pay for your therapy, and show up at your funeral. Real families don’t have HR departments. They don’t require two weeks’ notice before you can leave. They don’t celebrate your loyalty with pizza parties while the C-suite gets bonuses that could fund a small nation. You’re not a family. You’re a company with an HR department, a ping-pong table gathering dust, and a burnout problem you’ve rebranded as “hustle culture.”
“We’re looking for a self-starter.” Translation: we have no leadership, no process, and no idea what this job actually does. You’ll inherit three half-broken systems held together with duct tape and prayers, a boss who perpetually “circles back” but never actually arrives, and an inbox full of ghosted email threads from 2019. You’ll start things yourself because no one else ever finishes anything. We’ll call it “autonomy.” You’ll call it “therapeutic abandonment.” The self-starter isn’t empowered. They’re alone. They’re the person who figures out the Wi-Fi password is still “Password123” and that nobody’s updated the database since the Bush administration. Which Bush? Take your pick.
“We move fast and break things.” Cool slogan if you’re a toddler with a hammer. In adults, we call it negligence. What you really mean is, “We sprint through chaos, ignore QA, ship broken products, and pray no one notices the data breach until we’ve raised another round.” You’re not bold. You’re reckless. You’re the person who runs with scissors and calls it disruption when you trip. Move fast and fix things. That’s the grown-up version. That’s what people with insurance do.
“We’re disrupting the industry.” The only thing you’re disrupting is my will to live. You sell subscription socks. You’ve added an app to something that worked fine without one. You’ve taken a thing people already had and made it require a login, a monthly fee, and venture capital. Calm down. Unless your product makes fossil fuels irrelevant or ends hunger, you’re not disrupting anything. You’re mildly inconveniencing incumbents with better lawyers and longer runways. Disruption used to mean something. Now it means you put “AI-powered” in front of a sandwich and called it innovation.
“We’re looking for a culture fit.” Perfect. You want someone who looks, thinks, and drinks IPA exactly like you. Someone whose personality disappears seamlessly into the beige wallpaper of groupthink you’ve cultivated. Heaven forbid you hire someone who challenges your Slack emoji choices or doesn’t laugh at Chad’s cold open in standup. “Culture fit” is code for “we’re terrified of difference.” Just say it: “We only hire people we’d invite to trivia night, and if you don’t find our inside jokes funny, you’re out.” Mediocrity loves company. And you’ve built a whole hiring process around it.
“We’re thought leaders.” Self-proclaimed prophets of LinkedIn, armed with Canva templates and the confidence of someone who’s never been edited. Thought leadership isn’t when you post a quote about resilience over a stock photo of a mountain at sunrise. It’s not when you repackage someone else’s HBR article with your corporate logo. It’s when you have an original thought worth following. It’s when people seek you out because you’ve actually done something, said something, or solved something that mattered. You’re not a thought leader. You’re a thought karaoke singer. You’re hitting the notes someone else wrote, and the audience is only clapping because they’re contractually obligated to engage with your content.
“I’m a TEDx speaker.” Ah, the modern equivalent of “I have a blog.” Look, I’m thrilled you gave an 18-minute talk at TEDxSuburbanParkingLot to an audience of 47 people, including your mom and the AV guy who couldn’t leave. But slapping that little red logo on your LinkedIn headline doesn’t make you Brené Brown. It makes you someone who successfully filled out an application and convinced a local organizing committee that your thoughts on “synergistic paradigm shifts” were worth a Sunday afternoon. Real TED speakers get invited. TEDx speakers get a weekend and a ring light. There’s a difference, and it’s roughly the size of your actual audience.
“I’m a keynote speaker.” Keynote at what? Your cousin’s MLM conference? A breakout session at a Holiday Inn Express where the “stage” was a slightly raised platform and your microphone was borrowed from the wedding in the adjacent ballroom? Being a keynote speaker means something when people pay to hear you, not when you pay for the privilege of being there. If your speaker fee is “exposure” and a continental breakfast, you’re not a keynote. You’re entertainment between the danish and the breakout sessions on leveraging Instagram reels. And if you have to tell people you’re a keynote speaker instead of them already knowing, congratulations: you’re not one.
“I’m a creator.” Oh good, because “unemployed with a ring light” was getting too specific. Creator of what, exactly? A YouTube channel with 340 subscribers, most of whom are bots? A newsletter that goes to your aunt and three people who forgot to unsubscribe? Let me guess: you create “content.” That beautiful, meaningless word that encompasses everything from Tolstoy to someone filming themselves eating increasingly dangerous amounts of cinnamon. You’re not Hemingway. You’re not Issa Rae. You’re someone with a Canva Pro subscription and the unshakable belief that the world needs your thoughts on productivity hacks you learned from someone else’s TikTok. Creators used to make things. Now they make “personal brands” and worry about engagement rates. Here’s a wild idea: create something that exists independent of an algorithm’s approval. Write a novel. Build a table. Compose a song. Make something someone might still care about when Instagram is a digital graveyard. Until then, you’re not a creator. You’re a content generator with good lighting and a parasocial relationship with your analytics dashboard.
“I’m a social media influencer.” Congratulations, you’ve successfully monetized the desperate need for strangers to validate your existence. You influence people to buy protein powder you don’t use, skincare you were shipped for free, and a lifestyle you can’t actually afford without the sponsorships that pay for it. You’re not influential. You’re a walking, talking, carefully filtered billboard who’s convinced yourself that #ad #partner #gifted counts as a career because a vitamin company sent you a discount code and sixty dollars.
Real influence changes minds, shifts culture, moves policy. You change purchasing decisions for people scrolling on the toilet. You didn’t build anything. You didn’t invent anything. You pointed a camera at your face enough times that an algorithm smiled back, and now you think that makes you a tastemaker.
Here’s the test: if Instagram collapsed tomorrow, what would you be? Because influence that depends entirely on someone else’s platform isn’t influence. It’s tenancy. You’re renting relevance from Silicon Valley, and the lease is up the second engagement drops or a younger, hotter version of you shows up with better ring light placement.
ME? What do I know? I’m just a person who wishes job postings would say what they mean and mean what they say. I’m the kind of person who thinks inside the box. And from in here, the view is spectacular.
