Aside from the skills specific to each industry, modern job postings are often nearly identical. It’s a rare job posting that isn’t littered with meaningless buzzwords; they take up pages with descriptions of their ideal candidates and those ideal candidates’ ideal skills, but what are they really saying? Wonder no more, job seeker, for here is a guide that will clear up the murky mysteries you face on the long road toward finding a new career.

1. Dynamic

When a workplace is described as “dynamic,” this means that no one could really think of a word that would describe it. It’s probably the same as the 50 other workplaces you looked at this week; the only sense in which it is full of life is that it’s populated with living human organisms.

2. An Exciting Place To Start Your Career

Translation: “This is not an exciting place to work.”

3. Our Employees Are Passionate People

Translation: “If you get this job, you need to pretend to care about it for at least six months.”

4. Fast-Paced Environment

Translation: “You’ll be expected to take on the workload of two people because we don’t want to pay two people to do this job.”

5. Demanding

A “demanding” work environment will most likely require you to prove your dedication by working “some” nights and weekends in addition to your regular hours for no additional pay.

6. Looking For Flexible Candidates

Translation: “You’ll be asked to do all the stuff that no one else wants to do. This will be the most stressful job of your life. There will be no back-talk.”

7. Multi-Tasking Is Essential

Translation: “You’ll be expected to have an unrealistic number of skills already in place since we don’t want to invest any time or effort in training anybody; what we’re really interested in is sucking as much productivity out of one person as possible.”

8. Aggressive And/Or Driven

Translation: “The CEO of this company is the closest thing to a sociopath you’ll ever meet, and s/he likes his/her employees to have a similar shark-like personality. Assholes are rewarded here.”

9. This Is A Challenging Workplace

Translation: “We know that no one really wants to be challenged at their job, but apparently workplaces are supposed to be intellectually stimulating and challenging, so let’s pretend that that’s what we are, even though we both know it’s a bald-faced lie.”

10. Seeking Energetic Candidates

Translation: “You’ll be running all of the errands until we can find an unpaid intern.”

11. Highly Skilled

“We’re looking for highly skilled workers who can jump right in” is code for “We’re looking for people who already know how to do this exact job and all the specific duties it entails without needing even a day of training, although that’s technically impossible and we probably should have just hired from within the company.”

12. Competitive Salary

Translation: “We’re not posting the actual salary because we want you to go through the rigorous, stressful process of applying and interviewing before you find out that we pay $12 an hour.”

13. Entry Level

Translation: “This position requires at least two years of experience in a similar field. This is not an entry-level job; whoever wrote this job posting just thought it would be fun to write the words ‘entry level,’ which are basically meaningless and obsolete.”

14. No Experience Necessary

Translation: “Experience is absolutely necessary.”

15. We’re Like Family Here

Translation: “You’re participating in mandatory employee outings whether you like it or not.”