We are super excited. Are you super excited and passionate?

When I applied for my first job at 14, dishwasher, at a local hotel I found the advert on the notice board of the Co-Op.

I recall it said something along the lines of 'Dishwasher wanted. Hotel Jolly Canoeist, Llarerggub. Transport provided to and from the town. Call Llarerggub 123123.'

Now that's what I call descriptive. 
I know what they want. 
I know where they want it. 
I know how to make contact. 

I got the job and, guess what, I washed dishes, washed them very well indeed and got paid. In retrospect I'm not entirely sure I should have been operating the monster dishwasher all alone for hours on end in a steam filled dungeon at 14. Health and safety had a more relaxed interpretation in those days.

My next job was via the milkround at university. This time the companies recruiting were on a printed list. On a noticeboard. I applied to three, got offered one, took it, my career took an unexpected detour but I got a company car, expenses, lots of travel and a bad attitude which took years to detox from.

If you wanted a job elsewhere you had a few channels to try - trade magazines, professional  subscriptions, Times Educational Supplement and, if you fancied you were ready for CEO of Consolidated Hoo Hahas, then the Times, FT or Daily Telegraph were useful. Occasionally I would resort to paying for a weekly newspaper (typically a Thursday edition) to be mailed to me with the local jobs from a location I thought I wanted to work in.

Jobs were advertised in specific sizes of column inches and employers paid for a number of insertions so they had to be very precise at describing the job, the candidate they were looking for and the salary  The text was often a cross between the mysterious text of a telex (oh come on, you must remember those) and the necessity of cramming enough description in to attract candidates just like an early Tweet limited to 146 characters. The temptation to use a font size of 4 must have been immense.

But
You knew what they wanted - to some extent
You knew where they wanted it, the location
You knew how much the pay was likely to be.

Naturally you wrote your CV, or if you were cutting edge, would type it, and send it off. I do seem to remember a few recruiters did ask for a SAE so they could send you a prescribed form. Weeks and months might pass but I recall you always got a response from a recruiter if you hadn't been successful

In the mid 90's I was a marketing manager and, as you do, looked around at other likely positions. There were several marketing magazines around crammed with jobs and this is where it started to go weird. These periodicals were packed with jobs that sounded if the entire team was off their collective heads all the time 'wacky, creative, fun loving agency, huge energy, long hours, great team, needs like minded individual to kind of produce something the client may want every so often, did we say we were totally wacky, ring now, London area, competitive salary.'

Most of them were like that. You had no idea of who they were, where they were actually located (I mean what is the definition of the 'London area'?), had no idea of how much they were paying (who was defining what competitive was?) and little idea of what they wanted from a candidate. As long as you were a gregarious, stoner, party animal who knew the difference between above and below the line marketing you were just the very thing. In the end I became convinced that most of the jobs didn't actually exist, it was just the agencies playing some sort of psychological battle with their competitors trying to show they had more clients than anyone else and needed to recruit, recruit, recruit or checking if their own staff were trying to leave.


And so to contemporary job seeking. Everything is on-line, Just a few clicks and hundreds, thousands of jobs appear on your screen.You recall that sequence in the movie The Matrix where the data comes down a green screen. That's how it feels to me as I undertake my thrice weekly job search.

But something else has changed. No longer do companies want competent, responsible, reliable employees to come and and do a darn good job day in day out, no longer is it enough to be tolerably interested in what you do or manage to get through the day without slumping with ennui on to your desk. No, now you have to be;

• Passionate about, well whatever it is they are doing. And if they do something else then presumably you have to switch the object of your passion which sounds a little promiscuous to me.
• You have to be excited as well - how does that play out then, running around like a demented puppy, like winning the lottery?
• Then you are expected to be proud of what you do.

Don't forget you have to go the extra mile as well. Not just stay on for a few minutes each day without pay just to get things ready for tomorrow but you have to go miles, scale unscalable peaks, be committed. 

That's a lot of emotions. Do you have to exhibit them all at once, in sequence, weekly? I don't know.

And then, because everyone seems to have run out of adjectives to describe these emotions or they need even more of them, a superlative is added - now you have to be super excited, super proud, and super passionate. Passionate means to 'have strong feelings' but this isn't enough they have to be even stronger. People will explode.

As I skim through these jobs on line a great weariness comes over me. 

Here's just a few examples taken at random. Actually not that random, they are the first four jobs I've clicked on.

• Passionate about all things digital 
• A commitment to excellence
• A passion to understand shopper data (really, someone has a passion for that?)
• A passion for wine (OK that works for me), but then goes on to spoil it with 'a passion for luxury brands.'

None of them say how much they pay. Only 'it's competitive.' This is also a nonsense. How do I know whether to apply if I don't know the salary range the company is working to? They must know. They've budgeted for it. Maybe they have a Passion Based Salary Meter (PBSM) which generates a possible salary based on the electrical discharge the passion, commitment and going the extra mile creates at interview. 'Crikey the PBSM has hit 83%, we'd best consider a tad over minimum wage.'

There we are then. The world seems to be filled by people who are at maximum passion all day long, or MaxPass as I think I will now call it.

I prefer the idea of the pilots flying me to my distant destination to be highly competent professionals who quite like their jobs and getting me there safely without drama, being in the hands of a well trained dentist whose hands are steady as she deals with fillings and finds parts of her job to be far more interesting than others and not hurting me. All this passion for stuff sounds very exhausting. How on earth did we mange the industrial revolution? If only all our Victorian predecessors had not been such slackers.