The words in a job posting decide who reaches for the application form — and who puts it down.
A job advertisement does not describe a vacancy neutrally. It describes it through the assumptions of whoever writes it, and those assumptions encode a model of the ideal candidate before any CV is read. In computing recruitment, those assumptions have structural roots.
- 1960s–70sreclassification of programming detaches it from clerical grades; posting language shifts register
- Credential inflationformal qualifications attached to roles where prior work had required none
- Masculine-coded languageidentified in later research as a measurable applicant-pool filter
- Requirement list lengthlonger lists depress applications unevenly across demographic groups
When programming was reclassified upward in British organisations during the 1960s and 1970s — detached from clerical grades and repositioned as technical or managerial work — the language used to advertise it shifted accordingly. Posts that had been filled by women moving up from the card room began to be written in a register that addressed a different imagined reader. Requirements multiplied: formal qualifications, prior technical exposure, the vocabulary of engineering. The effect was to narrow the applicant pool not through explicit exclusion but through the cumulative signal of who the copy assumed the reader to be.
Research on job advertising has identified two broad patterns in requirement language. The first is credential inflation — attaching degree requirements or specific qualification thresholds to roles where the actual work does not demand them. The second is the accumulation of what are sometimes called masculine-coded descriptors: words like competitive, dominant, aggressive in lists of desired traits, terms borrowed from sport or military contexts, the framing of work as conquest or challenge rather than craft or collaboration. Neither pattern is deliberately exclusionary; both function as filters regardless of intent.
Everything downstream — screening, interview, offer — applies only to those it did not already turn away.
Length matters too. Longer requirement lists are associated with lower application rates from candidates who do not match every item, and women, on average, are more likely than men to treat a partial match as disqualifying. A list of twelve requirements, even where six are genuinely necessary and six are aspirational padding, does different work on different readers.
In British computing specifically, the reclassification period left a legacy in how technical roles are framed: the assumption of full-time, linear careers, of continuous professional development uninterrupted by breaks, of availability that does not account for caring responsibilities. These are not stated as requirements. They arrive in the phrasing — in what a posting takes for granted rather than what it asks.
The advert is not the largest filter in hiring, but it is the earliest. Everything downstream — screening, interview, offer — applies only to those it did not already turn away.