Ask someone to describe a stereotypical job advert and you will probably hear the same words. Dynamic. Passionate. Self-starter. Hit the ground running. We read 5,975 live UK job adverts across 29 occupations expecting exactly that. We barely found them.
"Go-getter" appeared once. "Self-starter" turned up in 0.2% of adverts, one in 500. "Results-driven" in one in 300. "Rockstar", "ninja" and "guru" did not appear at all. The 2010s advert, all hustle and swagger, has left the building. The cliches have not gone away. They have changed.
The cliche leaderboard
Share of the 5,975 adverts containing each phrase:
Two things stand out. Even the top phrase, "flexible", only reaches one advert in three, and it is not always a cliche: in plenty of adverts it points at genuine working arrangements, which is now one of the best things an employer can offer. And "team player", a phrase so worn it has become a punchline, shows up in one advert in fourteen. Most adverts are plainer than their reputation.
What replaced the buzzwords is a feeling
Look at what sits at the top instead. Passionate. Enthusiastic. Motivated. Driven. Thrive. These are not descriptions of a job, or even of a skill. They describe how you are supposed to feel about doing it. Yesterday's cliche advert wanted swagger. Today's wants emotion.
That matters for you as a candidate, because a feeling is impossible to prove on a CV. You cannot evidence "passionate" the way you can evidence a forklift licence or a sales figure. So when an advert asks for it, the trick is not to say it back. It is to show it.
Which jobs want you to be "passionate"
The demand for personality is not spread evenly. It tracks how much of the job is spent with other people. Share of adverts asking for someone "passionate", by occupation:
Teaching assistant, care, retail and reception adverts lean on it hardest. Bus driving, HGV and warehouse work barely touch it: those adverts describe the licence, the shift and the rate and stop there. A bus company wants to know you can drive the bus. A care home wants to know you are passionate.
How to answer an advert full of trait words
When an advert asks for passion, enthusiasm or drive, do the opposite of repeating it. Turn the trait into evidence. Instead of writing "I am passionate about care", write the thing a passionate person actually does: "I noticed a resident was eating less and flagged it to the nurse, and we caught an infection early." That single line proves the trait without ever claiming it, and it is the kind of sentence a shortlister can actually use.
Do the same with the rest. "Reliable" becomes "two years, no missed shifts". "Attention to detail" becomes "reconciled the till to the penny every close". "Team player" becomes the specific thing you did for the team. Mirror the real requirements in an advert, the skills, tickets and tasks, word for word so both a recruiter and any software find them. Leave the adjectives to look after themselves.
Method
We read 5,975 live UK job adverts across 29 occupations, deduplicated, collected from Find a Job and the public boards that feed it. Each advert's text was searched for a set of well-known cliches, matched on whole words so a phrase inside a longer word was not counted. Figures are the share of adverts containing each phrase at least once. This is an analysis of how employers write, not a claim about how any workplace really feels, and it is a snapshot of the current market rather than a measure of change over time.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most overused phrase in UK job adverts?▾
Across 5,975 live UK adverts, "flexible" was the single most common cliche, appearing in 28%. But "flexible" often points at genuine working arrangements rather than filler. The most overused pure buzzwords were "passionate" and "fast-paced". Even so, no single phrase appeared in more than a third of adverts, so the picture of adverts as wall-to-wall buzzwords is mostly a picture of the worst ones.
Are job advert cliches like "self-starter" still common?▾
No. The corporate cliches people mock hardest have almost disappeared. "Self-starter" appeared in 0.2% of the 5,975 adverts, one in 500. "Results-driven" in one in 300. "Go-getter" turned up exactly once, and "rockstar", "ninja" and "guru" did not appear at all. The 2010s hustle advert has largely gone.
Should I copy job advert language into my CV?▾
Mirror the real requirements, not the cliches. If an advert lists a skill, a certificate or a task you have, use the same words for it so a recruiter and any software both find it. But do not paste back adjectives like "passionate" or "dynamic": they cannot be evidenced and add nothing. Answer them instead with a concrete example of what you did.
Why do so many job adverts ask for someone "passionate"?▾
Because the words are inherited, not chosen. Most adverts are edited from the last one for that role, so the cliche survives simply because it was there before. It shows up most in frontline, people-facing jobs: teaching assistant adverts ask for "passionate" 53% of the time, care worker adverts 40%, while bus driver and warehouse adverts almost never do.