Read enough job adverts and they start to blur into one long wish list. Flexible. Confident. A real team player. Passionate. So we counted. Across 5,977 live UK job adverts, how many personality traits does a single advert actually ask one person to have?
Most ask for two or three. But one in five asks for five or more at once, and the most demanding advert we found, a contact centre role, asked for eleven separate character traits in one posting. That is not a job description. That is a casting call for five different people.
The traits employers ask for most
We grouped the usual soft-skill phrases into fifteen traits and counted how often each turned up across the full text of every advert. Here is the top of the list:
Share of UK adverts asking for each trait
| Keyword | of adverts |
|---|---|
| Flexible | 35% |
| Confident | 28% |
| Team player | 28% |
| Passionate | 27% |
| Friendly | 22% |
| Good communication | 19% |
| Organised | 18% |
| Reliable | 14% |
| Enthusiastic | 13% |
| Motivated | 12% |
Look at what is missing. Not one specific, checkable skill makes the top of that list. The things employers ask for most are the things you cannot prove on paper and cannot really be marked down for lacking. Everyone can call themselves flexible and passionate, so everyone does.
How the demands stack up
The average advert asks for about two and a half traits, which sounds reasonable. The problem is the long tail. A big share of adverts pile the traits on:
Adverts asking for this many traits or more
| Keyword | of adverts |
|---|---|
| Three or more | 48% |
| Four or more | 33% |
| Five or more | 20% |
| Six or more | 10% |
| Seven or more | 5% |
Nearly half of all adverts ask for three traits or more. One in five wants five or more. When a single job wants someone confident and friendly and flexible and passionate and organised and a great communicator, it is not really describing a role. It is describing an ideal human, and no real person reads that and thinks "yes, that is exactly me".
Why this hurts good candidates
A long trait list does not filter for the best applicant. It filters for the most confident one. The people who read "must be a passionate self-starter with excellent communication" and apply anyway are not necessarily better at the job. They are just more comfortable claiming things about themselves. Capable, modest applicants read the same advert and count themselves out.
So if you have ever scrolled past a job because you did not tick every personality box, the data is on your side: almost nobody does. Those lists are aspirational, not literal.
What to do on your own CV
The instinct is to fight fire with fire: the advert wants five traits, so you list all five in your personal statement. Do not. A CV that says "I am a flexible, passionate, reliable team player" is the single most forgettable line a recruiter reads all day, because it is the line everyone writes.
Show the trait instead of claiming it. "Covered three colleagues' shifts during a staffing gap without dropping my own targets" says flexible and reliable without using either word, and it cannot be copied off an advert because it happened to you. Pick the two or three traits the advert leans on hardest, then prove each one with a real example from your own work. That is exactly the swap our CV tailoring makes: it reads the advert, spots the traits it keeps asking for, and rewrites your real experience to evidence them rather than parrot them.
Method
We analysed the full text of 5,977 live UK job adverts across 32 occupations, pulled from UK job boards including Find a Job (DWP), NHS Jobs and Reed in July 2026. We grouped soft-skill phrasing into fifteen traits (for example "flexible" and "adaptable" count as one trait, "team player" and "works as part of a team" as another) and counted an advert as asking for a trait if any phrase in that group appeared. Figures are the share of adverts containing each trait, and the share asking for at least a given number of distinct traits. All statistics are aggregates; no advert text is reproduced.
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Frequently asked
How many personality traits does a typical UK job advert ask for?+
Across 5,977 live UK job adverts we counted a median of about two and a half distinct personality traits per advert. But the spread is wide: one in five adverts asks for five or more, one in three asks for four or more, and the most demanding single advert asked for eleven.
Which personality traits do UK employers ask for most?+
Flexible tops the list at 35% of adverts, then confident (28%), team player (28%) and passionate (27%). Friendly, good communication and organised follow. Notably, the words at the top are all character traits rather than technical skills.
Should I put these traits on my CV?+
Not as a list of adjectives. Saying you are "flexible and passionate" proves nothing and every other applicant says it too. Show the trait through a real example instead: a time you covered a shift at short notice shows flexibility better than the word does.
Why do adverts ask for so many personality traits?+
Our data counts what adverts ask for, not why. What we can see is that the most-requested traits are the ones hardest to measure on paper, and the easiest to copy from one advert to the next, which is why so many adverts read alike.