Job hunting can be stressful—and with many folks unemployed at the moment, people are looking. But it’s difficult during ordinary times to find a good job—during a pandemic, any job will do. That means there are some unscrupulous folks out there looking to exploit the anxious mood of the moment. So, what’s a red flag when looking for a job? If you’re searching for work, take some of these Redditors’ experiences and advice with you.
1. Look For The Word “Sales”
“If the job description has about 20 items of which one is “sales” your job is going to be sales.” — Clapperoth
2. Lengthy Job Description
“If the job description has multiple items, then the majority of your duty is going to be the worst one of those items.” — fiendishrabbit
3. Everyone Who Calls Gets A Job
“Hiring lots of people on the same position, everyone who calls gets a job. Often means the job is either bullshit or they’re setting you all up to compete for the actual job.” — JustSomeFatBastard
4. High Turnover
“In a job interview I asked how long do people in this position stay. The Manger danced around the question and didn’t give me an exact answer. He just told me, I don’t know. ‘People come and go. They found other jobs and leave me hanging.’ That is sign of a place with high turnover. That answer made me take a hard pass on the job.” — zspartancats
5. Earning Potential
“Earning potential is stressed over current salary.” — eternalrefuge86
“I’ve found that if they truly expect you to ‘play hard,’ they usually mean they want you to ‘play hard’ after hours, for no pay, doing stuff you don’t want to do. And if you choose not to ‘play hard’ because you have a life outside of the office or you just don’t like playing softball in the heat, humidity, and mosquito swarms of a midwestern American August, you end up on that list of folks who won’t get promoted.” — twothirtysevenam
7. We Are Family
“‘We are a family here,’ which means this is how they try to make up for the shitty pay and long hours.” — Lord-AG
“Yes it’s a family in the sense that the company expects me to be willing to do anything to help you and your company anytime, anywhere, anyhow. You and your ‘brothers and sisters’ (aka the other overworked unappreciated peons) are conditioned to work harder to ‘help each other out.’ The problem there is that the only people who benefit are the people at the top. It’s essentially a predatory practice designed to force extra effort out of you by abusing your empathy and your connection to your coworkers. Johnny McCorporatefuckbag literally wouldn’t flinch if you drop dead at your desk from the stress, he would just be pissed at the loss of output and immediately be concerned with finding a new cog for the machine he calls a ‘family.'” — FlammableBrains
8. Higher Degrees For Entry Levels
“‘Master’s Degree Preferred'” for an entry level job.” — RonnieVanDan
9. Badmouthing Former Employees
“When they shit talk previous employees. They’re going to do it to you.” — telestrial
10. How Dedicated Are You?
“This was a red flag I had during an interview process once. I was doing a phone interview for an IT position and the person I was interviewing with basically changed the details of the job during the interview. Instead of the first shift hours the position promised, he immediately went into saying it would be 6+ months before the opportunity for first shift would even be a possibility.
Also, he was big into asking how dedicated I was to jobs. The idea of weekend shifts (again, not in the original description) kept coming up and how everyone had to be a team player and help out on weekends when needed. The kicker was when he started talking about how many hours he worked. He was bragging that he was up at 6am everyday working, then he’d go into the office for the day, come home to see his family for dinner, and get right back to work until 10-11pm every night.
I had never been turned off from a job faster in my life. He asked me to think things over and he’d send me some paperwork via email. Needless to say, I called him the next morning and declined the job. It was the worst interview process I’d ever been in.” — Sttommyboy