One of the criteria options of LinkedIn’s job-hunting function is level of experience. As a job seeker, you can select the experience for the job you’re looking for:

• Internship
• Entry Level
• Associate
• Mid Senior Level
• Director
• Executive

As an employer posting a vacant position on LinkedIn, these are your level-of-experience options. Before posting or publishing any job openings, you need to understand what you are asking of the position. You need to analyze, research, and explain in great detail every possible expectation for the position.

If you’re opening a spot for someone who is working towards a degree to continue learning while also gaining valuable experience contributing to your staff’s performance by taking on some of the smaller tasks–while offering a small stipend and/or college credit–then that’s an intern. If it’s a position for someone with some experience to hit the ground running–entry-level.

Need someone to take an existing/new department or entire branch to a new level? Senior-level Manager or a Director.

Seeking a new leader for the whole company? I imagine that would be an Executive Officer.

One would believe that such an idea would be common sense, and that job platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed and others would make things easier for employers to post openings accurately.

And then there are postings like this, where the job poster lists the position as entry-level while also declaring that they are not looking for entry-level candidates for the role:

As mentioned before, the experience level selection function on LinkedIn and other job sites is supposed to not just help job seekers easily find relevant positions based on their own experience or desired experience level (someone changing careers may want to find an entry-level position in their new field). But the function also allows employers the opportunity to narrow their demographics down to the candidates they want to recruit for that position.

As job seekers need to take the time to ensure their resume, portfolio and cover letters are presentable and free of errors in order to make the right first impression, so too do employers need to take extra care with presenting vacant positions they are trying to fill. In order to attract the right candidate, hiring managers need to do everything to make the right first impression as well.

Online platforms and functions are certainly not perfect. Glitches and bugs do indeed happen. How many times have you been prompted to download LinkedIn’s mobile app updates in order to fix various bugs? For all we know, this employer may have thought that including the side note of not wanting any entry-level candidates for the position could very well have been their way of side-stepping any potential glitches.

However, instead of looking like a company that analyzes and attempts to consider every precautionary measure, the gesture made this employer look like something no company, entrepreneur or aspiring CEO ever wants to be:

Wreckless.

Lazy.

Terrible.

Hiring managers AND job seekers: don’t be lazy. Analyze, compose, edit, proof, edit, and edit again.

If you are going to do a job, do it right.

If you want to get a job, do it right.

If you want to fill a job, do it right.