Decoding the Recruiter Email

“We’re looking for a rockstar engineer to join our fast-paced, mission-driven team. Competitive compensation, plus the chance to wear many hats and make a real impact.” I built that sentence out of six real recruiter emails, forwarded to me by friends over one week in June, because none of the six read differently enough from the others to bother keeping separate.

None of it is a lie, exactly. Nobody writing that email sat down and decided to mislead you. Most of it got typed in under fifteen minutes, pulled from whatever req template the last opening used, by someone juggling forty other openings this week. It doesn’t make the email more useful to read. It does change what you should do about it.

“Competitive compensation” now has to hide behind wide numbers, not silence

Fifteen states and Washington, D.C. required a salary range somewhere on the posting itself as of last year, and roughly sixty percent of listings on Indeed carry one now, up from eighteen percent in 2020 — a jump driven almost entirely by that wave of disclosure laws, according to research on the trend published in Harvard Business Review earlier this year. “Competitive compensation” with no number attached isn’t an oversight anymore across most of the country. The disclosure laws made that omission optional rather than standard, and somebody still chose it.

The workaround that survived the laws is a range wide enough to say nothing.

The researchers behind that piece — Alice Lee, Tae-Youn Park, and Sungyong Chang — found that regulators rarely define how wide a compliant range is allowed to be, which leaves employers broad discretion to post one that clears the legal bar without narrowing anything real. A company can list ninety thousand to a hundred and eighty thousand dollars for the same title and be entirely within the law in every state that requires disclosure.

Nobody has decided what “wear many hats” means yet, including them

Gergely Orosz ran a talent-sourcing job board for software engineering roles for two and a half years before shutting it down, and the reason he gave says something the postings themselves never will. About eighty percent of his paying customers, he wrote, never posted a single job — they went straight to a private talent collective and contacted vetted, senior engineers directly instead. The exception was 2022’s wave of mass layoffs, when even strong candidates were job hunting involuntarily and briefly showed up applying through a public board.

That split matters more than it looks like it should. A role a company has actually thought through gets a name, a level, and a specific person doing the sourcing — usually a recruiter or the hiring manager, reaching out to three or four people they already have in mind. A role nobody has fully scoped yet gets posted broadly and left to attract whoever applies, which is a cheaper way to fill a gap nobody has defined precisely.

“Wear many hats” is what a job description says when the second kind of role hasn’t been scoped, because nobody has decided which of the three or four things you’d actually be doing is the real job and which two are what’s left over once the first one gets covered. It isn’t automatically a bad sign — early-stage companies genuinely need people willing to do the undefined thing this month and a different undefined thing next month, and some people like exactly that kind of work. It just means nobody in the building has answered that question yet, including the hiring manager.

“We move fast” is describing their applicant pool, not their decision speed

Greenhouse’s 2024 State of Job Hunting report, built from its own platform data plus a survey of job seekers, put a number on something that had been true anecdotally for a while: eighteen to twenty-two percent of postings on the platform in any given quarter qualify as ghost jobs — live, applyable, and not attached to a real hiring intent. Sixty-one percent of job seekers reported being ghosted after an interview, up nine points from earlier the same year. Recruiter workload was up twenty-six percent over that stretch, and more than a third of that increase, Greenhouse found, was candidates mass-applying with AI tools rather than reading the posting at all.

Nobody moving through that volume is promising you a fast decision.

“We move fast” in a first email is almost always true about something — just not the thing you’d assume from reading it. It’s usually true of the applicant pool hitting that inbox, which really is moving fast, in the sense of arriving in large numbers, mass-generated on one end and skimmed on the other. It’s a description of pressure on their side, dressed up as a promise about yours.

Hung Lee, who runs the recruiting industry newsletter Recruiting Brainfood, put words to a version of this that I keep coming back to, in a note written after a podcast conversation got him thinking specifically about ghost jobs.

He didn’t offer a tidy explanation for it, either — he opened the question to his own readers instead of answering it himself, and I found that more useful than a confident answer would have been. I don’t think there’s one cause. Some of it is a posting kept open for optics. Some of it is a role that got cut after the req was already live. Some of it is a hiring manager who genuinely believes “fast” describes their intentions, even though nothing downstream of the posting has moved fast in living memory. I’ve mostly stopped trying to guess which one I’m looking at from outside a single email, because I usually can’t tell, and the guess wouldn’t change what I’d do next anyway.

What does change what you’d do next is having the actual date written down somewhere you’ll see it again. If three different recruiters all open with some version of “we move fast,” the promise is worth writing down and checking rather than trusting from memory — which is a smaller, more mechanical problem than it sounds, and roughly the one Vigil exists to solve: it keeps track of who said what by when, which catches a missed timeline instead of letting it slide into a full inbox unnoticed.

None of these three phrases are the actual problem. A tired recruiter reusing a template isn’t hiding anything from you, and neither is a hiring manager who hasn’t finished deciding what the role covers. The problem is that the vague version costs nothing to send and a specific question costs nothing to ask, and almost everyone defaults to sending the vague version because almost nobody on the other end has ever been asked to do better.

The honest test for any of these three phrases is whether the person who wrote it can answer one specific question about it without reaching for another phrase just as vague. Most of them can. Nobody’s usually asked them to before.