How to interpret sport job ads

During the search for the perfect sport job you scanned plenty of job boards, but you couldn’t find any sport job ads matching your education and experience? This is hardly surprising, since often companies are asking for impossibilities in sport job ads. Today’s sport job blog deals with the causes for this and explains how to decode sport job ads:

“For the job as Marketing Assistant we are looking for a young, creative, committed and confident individual with a completed university degree in Economics, Marketing and Informatics, at least 2-5 years of experience in a similar role and a broad social network in the sports industry. To fit the bill the perfect candidate should speak English, German and Spanish operational and have proven knowledge in SAP, Illustrator, Photoshop, HTML, SEO, SEA, Social Media, XYZ, ETC. Excellent analytical skills, communication skills, determination and a high creativity level are essential. We offer you a good working atmosphere, flat hierarchies, a young team as well as an attractive and performance-driven compensation.”

Although we might have exaggerated a bit in this sport job ad, sport job ads like this one ad could likely be real ones. What counts is not the detailed listing of sport job tasks in job ads, it is rather about fulfilling the ideal of the company or describing the profile of a dropped out employee. In sport job ads by bigger companies it often occurs that quality requirements of CVs are purposely very high since these companies want to keep the amount of applications submitted by inadequate candidates low.

Please don’t take empty phrases in sport job ads too serious. Usually there is a high chance to get invited to a job interview if you have around 75% of the attributes mentioned in sport job ads. Unfortunately there is no trick to decode sport job ads, but normally you can assume that the most important preconditions are mentioned in the first few sentences of the sport job ad. Furthermore concrete phrases have been established in sport job ads like it is already done in employment reference letters. Since these phrases are likely to whitewash bad working conditions, we decoded the most important phrases in sport job ads for you:

Good working atmosphere: needless phrase, since this is really subjective – the question is why a company that is known for a good atmosphere needs to particularly state this in sport job ads?

Flat hierarchies: be careful – this does not mean an opportunity of fast advancement but rather the fast takeover of responsibility.

Young team: just indicates a high fluctuation.

Attractive compensation: unfortunately this is a euphemism for a below-average remuneration – attractive only for the employer.

Performance-driven compensation: even worse than the attractive compensation, since most of times this indicates a basic salary with benefit scheme.

To sum it all up we just want to make clear that you shouldn’t take the phrases in sport job ads too seriously. Of course there might be a few black sheep amongst the sport job employers, which are using euphemisms to downplay grievances, but this fortunately isn’t the rule. If you spot sport job ads that fit your profile, then you always have the opportunity to search the internet for employer information and ask ex-employees on Xing or LinkedIn about their experiences with the sport job company. At the end of the day the only thing that counts in job ads and sport jobs is your gut feeling.

The Guardian and Forbes Magazine are providing further information about this topic if you want to dig in a bit deeper.