Purple Cow Job Description?
I guarantee you have read a purple cow job description. It’s one of those that, when you finished reading it, you said to yourself:
I am not qualified for this job but…is anyone?
They are looking for the purple cow. The ideal candidate does not exist!
I am going out on a limb to say that most job descriptions are badly written.
In my last corporate job, I had an open position to fill. I had to write a job description. Did I know how to write a job description? NO!
I went onto Indeed.com and searched for openings with the same job title. When I found one I liked, I copied it!
Did I know what a good description should look like? NO!
I am sure that the job description I picked was as vague as any other one I had ever seen.
I was expanding my team for a training and certification program. I wanted a technical trainer who was familiar with the program and was already certified. We had certified less than a thousand people worldwide. The candidate needed to have five years of technical training experience and be located in Austin, Texas.
The odds of finding someone who was certified in the topic, had five years of experience as a technical trainer AND lived in Austin, was close to ZERO! No, it WAS ZERO.
I was looking for the Purple Cow!
Did I write the job description saying I wanted everything? YES!
Note: This post was originally posted in August of 2014 and updated in September of 2018
Dissecting the Job Description
We will want to look at:
- High-level job description
- Responsibilities
- Requirements/Qualifications
- Education
(More: Is the Resume Still Relevant? )
High-Level Job Description
Can you honestly see yourself in this job? One of the problems with high-level job descriptions is they are so vague. Do not write yourself off even if it does not look like a fit just yet.
Perform a Google search using the high-level job description and see what comes up.
Responsibilities/Description
Read through this section carefully. Have you actually performed more than half of the responsibilities described? If so, you are probably qualified.
More importantly, do you want to have all of these responsibilities? For those of us in the 2nd half of life, we do not want the grind of lower-level tasks.
Requirements/Qualifications
Check out each item in the requirements/qualifications section of the job description:
- How many of the requirements/qualifications do you have? Make sure you meet at least half of the requirements/qualifications.
- Do you have equivalent requirements/qualifications? Do you have existing skills that you can map to what is in the job description? How long would it take, given your current experience, to attain what is needed?
Take some time to diagram out how your experience directly relates to these requirements. Creating a visual will help you determine whether this is a good fit for you, and give you a way to explain why you are a good fit.
Education
Do you have:
- All of the required educational credentials?
- The preferred educational credentials?
- The experience that can be substituted for any of the credentials?
One way to get around having all of the educational credentials is to put in your resume a statement like the following:
20 years of experience in xxxxxx…in lieu of an MBA.
This will often get you past the applicant tracking systems and at least get you a phone interview for you to prove your worth.
(More: What Does Your Resume Say About Your Age? )
Gender
Havard Business Review recently published an article Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified. Basically, the author opens the article with the statement:
You’ve probably heard the following statistic: Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.
Women appear to be especially susceptible to the Purple Cow job description and will tend not to apply.
Ladies, is this true based on your experience?
Do Not Be Afraid of the Purple Cow
The purple cow job description is an outgrowth of the explosion of technology that has been injected into the hiring process. The fact is, most companies do not use this technology effectively, or to be blunter, they do not know how to hire. You may want to read my post on 5 Things You Will Never Know About the Hiring Process on how broken the hiring process is at some companies.
Lastly, if you are following a targeted job search strategy, you will have an internal contact within the company. Ask your contact to find out what the hiring manager is really looking for!
Your next job is going to come via a relationship.
Have you encountered a Purple Cow job description?
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Very true that often job descriptions are essentially “wish lists.” You may not be the purple cow they are looking for in the job, but it is better to apply if you think you could be a good fit. There is almost never a “perfect” candidate, and you will always miss 100% of the shots not taken.
What’s the difference between a purple squirrel and a purple cow?
Tech writers with five years experience and already are in Austin are VERY common. Would you elaborate about the skills that make this particular position purple-cowish?
Purple cow and purple squirrel are essentially the same thing. If the job description says 5 years experience with XML, 5 years experience various Abode products, 10 years experience with Captivate,…..
Get the picture?
Thanks for the example, Marc. IMO, hiring-role people could help encourage candidates to respond if the announcements include duties and qualifications that truly apply to the position. I think inserting too many nice-to-haves tend to discourage potential candidates to skip responding. It’s a loss for both jobseeker and candidate seeker.
It sounds like good advice about n years of experience in xxxxxx…in lieu of [required degree].
Agreed. Purple-polka-dotted unicorns do not exist.
So why do hiring managers (and HR departments) continue to post such patently absurd laundry-list job requirements? (If they were seeking a doctor, the job post would read this way: “REQUIRED: EXPERT ratings in heart surgery, internal organs, anesthesiology, and cancer therapy. Skills in leading-edge brain surgery techniques preferred, but not mandatory.”
An old CIO friend of mine told me about a time when he’d just come into a new job and his staff were complaining about a position that had been open 6 months but that there were no good candidates for the role. Steve asked for the jobreq and sure enough, the list of “absolute mandatory requirements” (all at EXPERT proficiency to boot) was a long as your leg.
Steve told his staff to cut the requirements list to 3 mandatory and 3 nice-to-have’s. They screamed, fought, dragged their feet… “No, this job HAS to have ALL of these skills!!” He insisted that they follow his instruction.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that shortly after they finally complied, they got a new guy into the role… and by the 3 month mark all evidence was pointing that he was working out just great.
Not only did they waste 6 months TIME searching for a mythical person, they lost six months of productivity because the important job duties weren’t getting done. They weren’t just foolishly screening out good people to come interview, they were hurting themselves by being ridiculous in their requirements demands. Yet nobody questioned this ridiculous habit until Steve came in and insisted by virtue of his CIO role that they change.
Remember the good old days when people actually had to READ a resume and THINK about what it said? (Yeah, that makes me old.) “Applicant Tracking Systems” are simply keyword scanners… which leads to applicants trying to game the system by keyword stuffing on their resume… which leads to HR departments and Hiring Managers to complain that they are getting inundated with poor quality candidates…
Then they go lobby Congress to raise the L-1 and H1-B visa quota limits instead of taking a good look at the actual causes of the “lack of qualified candidates” mess. So who caused this problem? (Hint… not the candidates.)
Tim,
There should be peace on earth and good will towards men but…. stop getting logical!!
Hi Marc along with the purple cow we might want to associate technology. A recently published op ed by Michael Bloomburg that I read on Yahoo stated in his opinion technology has become a bigger threat to the middle class than the trade agreements. Qualified employees are suddenly made unqualified to do the job because the employer decided to put in new technology into the plant to make their bottom line more profitable thus laying off their employees to end up flipping hamburgers at a fraction of their previous wages. Then the employer is crying that they can’t find any one qualified to run the the new technology. The fable here is the first persons to be let go is the boss and the board of directors since they contribute the least to the success of the business.
Dean,
I agree with you. In fact, employers do not want to train people to run the new technology. They expect employees or perspective employees to have spent their own money to get trained with out the prospect of getting hired. This is a classic which comes first the chicken or the egg problem.
Marc
Thanks Marc! …..no qualifications, and yet they are the gatekeepers and judge of others’ qualifications….
I am still doing my targeted search strategy — going on what seems like forever now — anyway, I tend to look at requirements vs “preferred” items. Do you believe the writers get this distinction correct?
Gayle,
I believe most writers of job descriptions are unqualified to write them. I know I wrote job descriptions and I was not qualified to write them.
So…. do they get this right? Probably not.
Marc