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The job market is tough enough without wasting your best energy on jobs that were never really jobs.

You know the kind of listing. It has been open for six months. Or it appears every few weeks with slightly different wording. Or it reads like someone emptied a whole department into one job description and added “must be a self-starter” at the end.

Sometimes the company is hiring in good faith, but has no idea what it actually needs. Sometimes it knows exactly what it wants, but what it wants is three people for the price of one. Sometimes the role gets filled—and the person who takes it discovers very quickly why the company was struggling to hire.

And sometimes the post is simply not serious. It may be collecting CVs, waiting for a budget that does not exist yet, testing the market, or written around a person the company has already decided to hire.

None of this means you should become cynical or only apply to perfect roles. Most good jobs contain trade-offs. A small team may be messy but give you unusually good access to decision-makers. A broad role may be intense but teach you a lot. A role that does not look perfect on paper may come with a brilliant manager.

But candidates have thresholds too.

You might be happy with ambiguity if the learning is exceptional. Someone else might take a higher-risk role for the scope, salary, visa, location, or simply because it opens a door they care about. That is personal. There is no universal “never apply here” checklist.

There are, however, a few signals that should make almost everyone pause.

The useful move is not to instantly reject a post. It is to read it like a designer: notice the friction, work out what may be causing it, and decide whether the experience is worth continuing.

An old listing is not automatically fake. Companies can have a genuine hard-to-fill role. Hiring can take longer than expected. Sometimes a team keeps a role open because they will hire the right person when they find them.

But a post that keeps resurfacing without any visible movement deserves a closer look.

It may signal that the company is not truly ready to hire. It may be waiting for approval. It may be collecting candidates for a future need. Or it may have an expectation so narrow that no real person can meet it.

That does not mean you cannot apply. It means you should not pour three evenings into a bespoke application before knowing whether there is a live process behind the listing.

If you have a contact, ask politely whether the role is actively hiring and what stage the team is at. If you make it to a first call, ask when they hope to have someone start and what has made the search difficult so far.

An honest answer can be reassuring. “We paused the process while the team changed, but the headcount is now approved and we are interviewing this month” is clear. “We are always looking for exceptional talent” is a different kind of answer.

Good job posts do not need to be beautifully written. But they usually give you a sense of the work.

What is changing? What product, service, or customer problem needs attention? What would this person help the team do better? Why is the role needed now?

When all you get is a collection of generic responsibilities—“drive innovation,” “collaborate cross-functionally,” “make an impact,” “own the full experience”—there may be no clear brief underneath.

That is risky because you are not just applying for a title. You are applying for a set of expectations. If nobody can describe the central problem, those expectations can change every week depending on who speaks loudest.

Before you invest too much, try to find the centre of gravity. Ask: “What is the most important problem you need this person to help solve in the next six months?”

You are listening for something concrete. It does not have to be glamorous. “We are losing customers during setup,” “our product has become hard to navigate as it has grown,” or “we need to make our technical product easier for new users to understand” all tell you much more than a stack of buzzwords.

This is different from a role being broad.

Broad can be great. Some people love moving between product design, visual craft, prototypes, customer conversations, and implementation. The problem is a post that treats every capability as equally urgent, equally advanced, and equally owned by one person.

Design strategy. Research. UX. UI. Brand. Motion. Marketing. Copy. Front-end. AI. Data. Stakeholder management. Design systems. Community. Sales support.

That is not a role. That is a wish list.

Sometimes the company genuinely does not know which of these things it needs most. Sometimes it knows, but it is hoping one hire can cover the gap cheaply. Either way, you need to understand what would actually take up your week.

Ask: “If this person could only make one meaningful difference in their first few months, what would you want it to be?”

If they can answer, great. You may find that the giant list was only an overenthusiastic way of describing a much more focused job. If they cannot, be careful. Constant context-switching can look exciting from the outside while giving you very little room to do good work, develop depth, or finish anything you are proud to show later.

Titles are inconsistent. A “designer” at one company may do the work of a senior product designer somewhere else. A “lead” may have no reports. Titles rarely tell the full story.

So do not get stuck on the label.

Look at the relationship between the work, the decision-making power, the support, and the reward. A role can ask you to own a big area if it comes with a thoughtful manager, clear context, room to learn, and fair compensation. It becomes a warning when the company expects one person to set strategy, execute every detail, manage stakeholders, and fix the whole design function—with no experienced partner, no clear boundaries, and no realistic recognition of that weight.

“We need someone who does not need hand-holding” is a good example. Independence is valuable. But sometimes that phrase means: “We do not have time to brief, manage, or support you.”

Proactivity and support are not opposites. Good people still need context, feedback, and someone to make decisions with.

Ask: “Who would I work most closely with, and how are important decisions and feedback handled today?”

You are not asking for a perfect mentorship programme. You are checking whether the company has imagined a human being doing this work—or just a magical pair of hands.

“Fast-paced” is not a red flag by itself. Plenty of good teams move quickly.

The issue is when urgency starts to sound like the culture rather than a temporary situation.

Watch for language that celebrates permanent firefighting: “always on,” “no 9-to-5 mindset,” “we work harder than everyone else,” “must thrive in chaos,” or a long list of evening and weekend expectations hidden under “flexibility.”

Every company has busy periods. The question is whether the team sees those periods as something to manage, or as proof that people care.

That distinction matters. When pressure is normalised, thoughtfulness, craft, feedback, and healthy boundaries are usually the first things to disappear. You might still decide the upside is worth it. But it should be a conscious choice, not a surprise waiting three weeks after you start.

Ask: “What is making this role urgent right now, and what does a sustainable week on this team look like?”

An application should not feel effortless for the company and expensive for the candidate.

A portfolio walkthrough is normal. A conversation about your thinking is normal. A small, time-boxed exercise can be useful when it is clearly explained and reviewed properly.

But substantial unpaid work before the company has even invested in a real conversation is a warning. So is an assignment that looks suspiciously like an unresolved business problem, a request for production-ready work, or a multi-stage process that keeps growing with no transparency about the finish line.

The problem is not that companies want evidence. The problem is when they push the entire cost and risk of finding that evidence onto candidates.

Ask: “How much time should candidates expect to spend, who reviews the work, and is this related to a live problem the team is trying to solve?”

Respectful teams can answer that. They can explain the purpose and scope. They know your time has value even before you are hired.

Sometimes a post makes you feel smaller before you have even applied.

It may say the team only wants “exceptional” people, but offer no sign it will treat people exceptionally. It may demand relentless passion, extreme resilience, or gratitude for the chance. It may sound like the company believes boundaries, uncertainty, or normal human limitations are moral failures.

High standards are good. Challenging work is good. Caring about craft is good.

But there is a difference between “we want people who care deeply about their work” and “we expect people to prove their worth by accepting whatever we ask.”

That difference is not always obvious in one sentence. Look at the overall tone: does it describe a demanding environment with respect and clarity, or one that romanticises exhaustion and treats people as replaceable?

You do not need a company to sound soft. You do need it to sound like it understands that the people doing the work are people.

The goal here is not to find a perfect company. You will not.

The goal is to stop filling every gap in a job post with the best possible version of the story. Candidates do this all the time because they want the opportunity to be real. “Maybe the scope is not really that big.” “Maybe the manager is amazing.” “Maybe the assignment will only take an hour.”

Maybe.

But do not make the company’s case for them before they have done it themselves.

Instead, put roles into three buckets:

Those buckets will look different for everyone. That is the point.

What you should not have to negotiate with yourself is whether a company gets to be vague forever, demand free labour, disguise an impossible job as one role, or treat pressure as a virtue.

Your time matters, especially in a hard market. Read job posts with the same curiosity you would bring to a confusing product: notice what is missing, ask what is behind it, and decide if this is an experience worth continuing.

Not every open door leads somewhere you should go.

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Sophie Manalo’s portfolio balances two qualities that rarely sit together this comfortably: restraint around the work and playfulness everywhere else.

Projects remain front and center, supported by motion, concise writing, and strong visual hierarchy. Around them, Sophie has built a personal corner of the internet filled with experiments, food recommendations, photographs, and her own writing.

Her activity beyond the portfolio matters too. I first came across Sophie through social media, where she shares what she is making. Strong work becomes far easier to discover when its creator talks about it in public.

There is plenty worth borrowing from how Sophie presents herself and her work, so let’s take a closer look.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video portfolio review? Look no more. I do offer these as an async service you can book directly with me here.

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian