Why should the term “ hard­work­ing .…” or deriv­a­tives of it nev­er be used in Job Ads?

In my opin­ion and expe­ri­ence as a col­lege and post-grad edu­ca­tor and as man­ag­er and entre­pre­neur:
there are no lazy peo­ple!

There are only peo­ple who are in the wrong job, posi­tion or course or have not had enough guid­ance, encour­age­ment, recog­ni­tion or oppor­tu­ni­ties.

I believe the cul­prits for low per­for­mance are often weak or insuf­fi­cient­ly qual­i­fied man­agers or super­vi­sors.  Their lead­er­ship and moti­va­tion skills are prob­a­bly not well-devel­oped (yet).

There­fore, be clear in your job ads what you expect from future employ­ees and man­agers. The term ” hard­work­ing ” has too many mean­ings and inter­pre­ta­tions, so avoid it. A lit­tle bit of cre­ativ­i­ty can eas­i­ly make clear what you expect.

See the Collins The­saurus below for a prop­er choice:
hard­work­ing, adjec­tive
Syn­onyms:indus­tri­ous, busy, ener­getic, con­sci­en­tious, zeal­ous, dili­gent, inde­fati­ga­ble, assid­u­ous, sed­u­lous
Antonym (Oppo­site):lazy, indif­fer­ent, care­less, good-for-noth­ing, dila­to­ry, inconstant,from Collins The­saurus of the Eng­lish Lan­guage
Com­plete and Unabridged 2^nd Edi­tion. 2002 © Harper­Collins Pub­lish­ers 1995, 2002

The quin­tes­sence of the above the­saurus is that there are bet­ter ways to find tal­ent than using boot-camp­ish lan­guage. Do not use ambigu­ous words in job ads, instead be moti­va­tion­al and inter­est­ing. To find the gen­uine jew­els suit­ing your orga­ni­za­tion, how­ev­er, test your appli­cants in terms of man­age­ment com­pe­tence, per­son­al­i­ty, abil­i­ty and moti­va­tion.

Com­bined with an appro­pri­ate online selec­tion process this saves time for the com­pa­ny and for the appli­cant. Unnec­es­sary inter­views can be avoid­ed, knowl­edge about the can­di­date and her/​his gen­uine ambi­tions and moti­va­tions is great­ly improved and last­ly this knowl­edge can serve as basis for ben­e­fi­cial and mutu­al­ly enjoy­able job inter­views for sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly test­ed, select­ed and short­list­ed can­di­dates.

Though there are many job board and match­ing ser­vices, prac­ti­cal­ly all of them are want­i­ng. My team has devel­oped under my guid­ance the unique CeoInternational.com online Career-Mak­er test­ing and job match­ing ser­vice. We match a can­di­date’s expe­ri­ence, com­pe­tence and expec­ta­tions with a com­pa­ny’s needs, cor­po­rate cul­ture and job offer. I invite you to check it out at www.ceointernational.com  I am sure: you will be impressed!
With my best greet­ings
Peter Gruben­mann, PhD