The Cliché Tax: What Every Cliché in Your Job Ad Costs You

"Dynamic team." "Hands-on mentality." "Competitive salary." Every cliché in your job ad costs you something. I call it the cliché tax.

You don't see the bill, which is the annoying part. Nobody emails you to say "I didn't apply because you said you were a dynamic team." They just read it, feel nothing and scroll on. And the next ad they open says dynamic team too. And the one after that.

That's the real problem. Clichés aren't just boring. They're signals. When a candidate reads "competitive salary," what they actually hear is "we didn't want to tell you," and when every ad uses the same words, nobody remembers yours. Every cliché is a spot in your ad where something specific could have been. Something that only you could have written.

The 15 most common clichés (and what candidates hear)

These are the ones I see over and over. I'm not trying to be mean here, most of them were written by good people in a hurry. But it helps to read them the way a candidate does.

Okay, some of these are a bit unfair. Not every "fast-paced environment" is chaos. But that's exactly the point. The candidate can't tell the difference, because the words are the same in the good company and the bad one. So they assume the worst, or they just assume nothing, which is maybe even worse.

Why clichés happen

Nobody sits down and thinks "let me write something generic today." It happens in two ways, mostly.

The first one is copy-paste. There's an old vacancy, someone updates the title and the requirements, and everything else stays. That old vacancy was also copied from an older one. So you have phrases in your ad that have been sitting there for years and nobody even reads them anymore, they're just part of the template.

The second one is the intake with the hiring manager. You ask "what kind of person are you looking for?" and the answer is "someone proactive, a team player, who can handle pressure." Which is fair, that's what they want. But it's not what makes your job different. Those are the words people use when they haven't been asked the right question yet. If you ask "what did the best person in this role do in their first month?" you get an actual story. If you ask "what kind of person," you get clichés.

And there's a third one now, honestly. AI. If you ask a chatbot to "write a job ad for a sales manager," it gives you the average of every sales manager ad on the internet. Which means the average of every cliché. It's fast, but it makes the problem bigger, not smaller.

The replacement rule

This is the whole trick, and it's simple: every cliché gets replaced by a fact, a number or a moment.

A fact is something true and specific. "You report to Mira, who's been doing this for 12 years." A number is, well, a number. A salary range, a team size, how many clients, how many days at home. A moment is a small scene from the job. "Friday afternoon, the week's numbers come in and the whole team checks them together."

If you can't replace a cliché with one of those three, there are two options. Either you don't actually know it yet, so go ask someone who does the job, the day in the job interview is perfect for that. Or it wasn't true in the first place, and then you just delete it. Deleting is fine. A shorter ad with no clichés beats a longer ad full of them.

10 rewrites, before and after

These are made-up examples, no real companies. The numbers and names are placeholders to show the shape of a good rewrite. Fill in your own real facts.

See what happens? Every "after" is longer, yes. But every "after" also tells you something you can actually picture or check. And a candidate can now decide if this is for them, which is the point of an ad.

If you want to see how many points your ad loses to this, the Job Ad Scorecard has a check for "a day in the job" and one for must-haves, and clichés usually fail both. Speaking of which, a lot of clichés live in the requirements list. Cutting your must-haves to three gets rid of half of them on its own.

The full cliché list with rewrites

Copy this and keep it next to you when you write or review an ad. The right column tells you what kind of fact, number or moment to put in its place.

The cliché hunter prompt

Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or whatever you use, with your ad below it. It finds the clichés and rewrites them, but it won't make up facts, it'll ask you for them. That part is important, otherwise you just trade one kind of fake for another.

You are a recruitment marketer who hates clichés in job ads.

Read the job ad below and find every cliché. A cliché is any phrase that could appear in almost any job ad without changing a word, like "dynamic team", "competitive salary", "hands-on mentality", "fast-paced environment", "team player" or "growth opportunities".

For each cliché:
1. Quote it exactly.
2. Say in one short sentence what a candidate probably hears when they read it.
3. Rewrite it using the rule: every cliché gets replaced by a fact, a number or a moment from this specific job.
4. Only use facts that are in the ad. If you need a fact that isn't there, write [ASK: the question I should ask the hiring manager or someone in the team] instead of inventing one.
5. If the cliché doesn't say anything and can't be replaced, say "delete".

Then give me:
- A table with: cliché | what they hear | rewrite or [ASK] | fact, number, moment or delete
- The total number of clichés you found
- A list of all the [ASK] questions together, so I can send them to the hiring manager in one message

Write the rewrites in plain, simple, conversational English. No new clichés in the rewrites.

Job ad:
"""
[paste the job ad here]
"""

The list of [ASK] questions at the end is honestly the most useful part. You send it to the hiring manager, you get the answers back and suddenly you have an ad that sounds like your company instead of every company.

And if the ad is going to run in a feed instead of on a job board, there's one more step after this. Read Stop Writing Job Ads for Job Seekers for that.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cliché tax?

It's what you lose every time your job ad uses a phrase that could be in any job ad. Candidates read it as a sign that you didn't really think about them, and it makes your ad look like all the others, so nobody remembers it.

What are the most common job ad clichés?

"Dynamic team," "competitive salary," "hands-on mentality," "fast-paced environment" and "we're like a family" are the big ones. The full list of 15 is in the table above, with a rewrite for each.

How do I replace clichés in a job ad?

Replace every cliché with a fact, a number or a moment. "Competitive salary" becomes the actual range, "dynamic team" becomes the team size and who leads it. If you can't find a fact, ask someone who does the job, and if it wasn't true anyway, just delete it.

Can AI help remove clichés from job ads?

Yes, the cliché hunter prompt above finds them and rewrites them. Just make sure it asks you for missing facts instead of making them up, otherwise you end up with an ad that sounds specific but isn't true.