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Roast my job ad

Paste your job ad, get it roasted. Buzzwords, salary dodges, vague duties and coded language, scored out of 100 and quoted straight back at you. Your ad never leaves your browser.

Your job ad

0 words · Runs entirely in your browser. Your ad is never uploaded.
The verdict
 
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The charge sheet

Every charge quotes your own ad back at you. The roast is the diagnosis; the fix underneath is the part worth forwarding to whoever wrote it.

What makes a bad job ad?

The failures are consistent: no salary information, a wall of clichés ("fast-paced environment", "wear many hats"), duties so vague they could describe any job, a requirements list only a unicorn could meet, and far more words about the company than about what the candidate gets. Each one measurably cuts the number and quality of applicants. This tool checks for all of them at once and shows you where your ad stands.

How the roast works

The roast runs eight checks in your browser: recruiting clichés (the rockstars, ninjas and fast-paced environments), salary transparency (a real range beats a figure, a figure beats "competitive"), vague duties ("assist with", "other duties as required"), unicorn hunting (requirement overload and years-of-experience demands that contradict the seniority), gender-coded language, age-coded phrasing, readability, and how much of the ad is about the company instead of the candidate. The coded-language check uses the masculine and feminine word lists from Gaucher, Friesen and Kay (2011), the peer-reviewed research behind most gender-decoder tools; it reports a lean, not a verdict. Each check deducts from a starting score of 100, weighted by how much the evidence says it hurts response rates, and the total maps to a roast grade from Rare to Burnt to a Crisp. Everything runs client-side. Your ad is never uploaded, stored or seen by us.

New to the term? Read the plain-English definition of pay transparency laws in the HR Glossary.

Only here for the gender check? The standalone Gender Decoder runs the same published word lists and shows every matched term, both directions.

Assumptions
  • The checks are word lists and pattern matching. They see the words, not the meaning, so "competitive" in an ad for a genuinely competitive sales role is flagged the same as "competitive" used as filler. The quotes are shown so you can decide which is which.
  • The salary check reads the ad text. A salary that lives in a job-board field but not in the copy you pasted reads as missing, and "competitive salary" scores as absent because to a candidate it is.
  • The weights lean on published evidence where it exists (SEEK's data on salary and application volume) and on practitioner experience for the rest. The grade bands are conventions. The score is a guide to what to fix, not a measurement.
  • Coded-language checks use the Gaucher, Friesen and Kay word lists and report a lean, not a verdict. No word on either list is banned language.
  • The roast does not check whether the ad is lawful. It can see age-coded phrasing; it cannot see whether the pay rate offered clears the award, and an ad below the minimum is a compliance problem no rewrite fixes.
Sources

What to do about it

A bad ad is what an unstructured hiring process looks like from the outside. The role was never defined, so the ad asks for everything and says nothing. These steps are for whoever writes and posts the ad, whether or not they own the role.

1

Fix the salary line first

A range beats a figure and a figure beats "competitive". Take the SEEK number above to whoever has to approve publishing the range: about a third more applications for one sentence is the easiest argument in recruiting.

2

Rewrite the duties as what the person will own by month six

"Assist with" and "other duties as required" describe nothing. Three or four concrete outcomes tell a good candidate whether the job is theirs, and tell you whether the role has actually been designed.

3
Where a tool helps

Cut the requirements to the ones you would reject someone for lacking

Split the list into must and nice, in writing, with the hiring manager in the room. If the years-of-experience line contradicts the seniority or the salary, drop it; every requirement past the real ones removes people you wanted.

4

Read the coded quotes and keep only the ones that describe the work

Masculine-coded and age-coded phrases mostly arrive with the template. Swap the filler, keep anything that carries information about the role, and fix the template so the next ad does not start in the same place.

5

Read it as the candidate, then measure the next two ads

What does the person get, and is it in the first third of the ad. Re-run the roast after the rewrite, post it, and compare applications per view with the last version. Two ads is enough to see whether the changes worked.

The ad is a symptom.
Fix what it describes.

Compono Hire is an applicant tracking system (ATS) that measures fit before you make the offer, starting with a definition of what the role actually needs and then matching every candidate against it on work personality and culture fit. Most ATSs take the ad as given and manage the pipeline that follows it.

Step 3 is the hard part of the rewrite, because cutting requirements means agreeing what the role needs. Hire makes that definition the first step of the process rather than an argument in a comment thread, so the ad can say something specific and the shortlist can prove it.

See how it works
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Common questions

Is it safe to paste a real job ad in here?

Yes. The analysis runs entirely in your browser using word lists and pattern matching. Nothing you paste is uploaded, stored or sent to Compono or anyone else. Close the tab and it is gone.

Should I put the salary in a job ad?

Yes. SEEK's own research puts numbers on it: job ads with a visible salary receive about 36% more applications, and 87% of candidates say knowing the salary before applying is extremely important. "Competitive salary" is read by candidates as "below market or we would have said". A genuine range also filters out people you were never going to agree terms with, which saves everyone a round of interviews.

What is gender-coded language in a job ad?

Words that research links to gendered self-selection. Gaucher, Friesen and Kay (2011) showed ads heavy in agentic words like "competitive", "dominant" and "determined" attract fewer women applicants, while communal words like "supportive" and "collaborative" lean the other way. Neither list is banned language; the problem is a strong lean you did not intend. The roast reports the lean and lets you decide.

How is the roast score worked out?

Every ad starts at 100. Each of the eight checks deducts points based on severity, with the heaviest weights on missing salary information and cliché density because they do the most damage to application rates. 85 or above grades Rare, 65 to 84 Medium, 40 to 64 Well-Done, and below 40 is Burnt to a Crisp. The score is a guide for improving the ad, not a scientific instrument, and the fixes matter more than the number.

This page is general information, not legal advice. We check figures annually and update them on a best-efforts basis, but employment rules change and we cannot promise everything here is current or complete. Before you act on it, confirm the detail with the relevant authority in your country or your own adviser. Last reviewed July 2026.

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