A job post is a wish list, not a contract

A job post is usually a draft by three people: the team that will live with the hire, someone in HR, and sometimes a recruiter. The result is not a contract. It is a wish list. You will not be rejected for missing every bullet. A few lines, though, are real gates. Telling those apart is the work.

You see the same shape on Kariyer.net and on Greenhouse. The title sounds senior. “3–5 years” is in there. Then a dozen tools, plus a sentence about a fast-paced environment. Reading one posting slowly is more useful than tab-hopping through ten.

Believe the day-to-day, not the title

“Senior” in a 15-person product team and “Senior” at a 4,000-person bank are not the same job. In Turkish listings, uzman, yetkili, and mühendis get used loosely. In international posts, Staff and Principal often do mean seniority. Sometimes they just mean the company inflated its ladder.

The more reliable signal is the work itself. On-call. Managing people. Building a platform from scratch. Closing Jira tickets. Those are different jobs. If the title fits and the day-to-day does not, skip it.

The reverse is also true. Title one level up, work close to what you already do: it is too early to walk away. Plenty of teams write the posting a grade high and figure out who they actually hired in the interviews.

The spine versus the shopping list

Split the tools into two piles.

The first pile is the spine of the role. “Run production systems in Java and Spring” is spine for a backend seat. The second pile is Kafka, Kubernetes, Grafana, Terraform, growth mindset, and excellent communication. Some of that is real. Some of it was pasted from the last req.

A practical tell: what repeats. If a responsibility shows up three times, it is more real than a requirement that appears once. If the post bothers to mark “nice to have,” believe it. If it is an unmarked dump of ten lines, treat everything after the first two as speculative.

There is also the paste smell. If you have seen the same “we value diversity, ownership and a bias for action” paragraph at three companies, that paragraph is not screening you. Nobody is reading it. The work is in the bullets above it.

One missing skill is not an automatic no. A missing spine is. If you can say in an interview “I have not used that, I have used this, here is how I would cross,” the posting was not written to exclude you.

A small example. The posting wants Kafka; you have shipped messages with RabbitMQ. If the spine is “move events asynchronously,” the application should live. If the spine is “keep our Kafka cluster up at 03:00,” it should not. The difference is not the tool’s name. It is the rest of the sentence.

Location is the line people skip

People argue with the title and the stack. They miss the single location sentence near the end.

“Remote,” then a paragraph later, candidates must reside in Germany. “Hybrid, Istanbul,” then four days on site. “EMEA remote,” then right to work in the UK. Those gates are harder than a tool you have not used. Remote-from-Turkey fine print is its own subject. Here it is enough to say: do not spend time before you have read that sentence to the end.

No salary range is still common in Turkey. Decide first whether the role is actually a fit. If it is, ask for the range in the first serious conversation. Opacity can be a filter. Running three rounds without a number also burns your calendar.

What “3–5 years” is trying to say

Years are among the least honest lines on a posting. “3–5 years of Java” sometimes means three years in production. Sometimes it means the most junior person on the team has five. Sometimes a recruiter typed it to open the Senior requisition.

Read the years next to the responsibilities. Three years plus “architecture calls, budget, on-call for two teams” means the years are the lie and the seniority is real. Five years plus “pick up tickets, open PRs, come to standup” means the years are inflated and the work is mid-level.

“Even if you do not have X years, apply” is sometimes sincere, especially for internships and early-career seats. On a mid-level backend posting the same sentence may just be there to fill a funnel. Your test does not change: can you point at two proofs in the day-to-day.

Pay, perks, “competitive”

Leaving the range off is still ordinary in Turkey. Writing it is more common on international posts, but “competitive” is still around. Competitive is not a number.

If there is no range, ask in the first serious conversation. “What is the budget?” is enough. You do not have to name your number first. If you do, give a range, not a single figure. No range after three rounds means the process is using your calendar cheaply.

Perk language inflates too. “Flexible hours” can sit next to a hybrid office. “Learning budget” can be a $200 coupon. That is not automatically a no. Just do not confuse the garnish on the posting with the line in the offer.

When not to apply

“Just apply, it cannot hurt” is easy to say. It can hurt. Each application costs a CV pass, a form, some hope, and sometimes a six-month “we already saw this person” flag at the same company.

Clear nos:

• The day-to-day is not even adjacent to the role you want
• The seniority ask is plainly above you, and the posting is not shy about it
• Location or working pattern is unworkable
• The same text has been up for 90 days, it is missing from the company’s own careers page, and the apply link dumps you onto an agency

Grey area: ask which two experiences you would push to the top of the CV. If you cannot name two, the story does not fit. You do not need to rewrite the whole CV. If you cannot see the two emphases, skip it.

Seeing the same role on two boards under two titles is also grey. Greenhouse says “Backend Engineer”; LinkedIn says “Senior Software Engineer, Istanbul.” It is probably one seat. Do not apply twice. Pick the source, send one form.

A matcher like JobInbox will not finish this reading for you. It can narrow role, level, and location. The “actually, office” sentence is still yours.