For some employers, even elite warrior skills aren’t enough. “If a sense of humor isn’t your sixth sense, then even certified marketing ninjas need not apply,” asserts the description for a marketing director at an upstate New York paper company.

These listings weren’t hard to find. A short scroll through a popular job board revealed thousands of results with similar keywords. More than ever, it seems, hiring managers are looking for extremists: You can’t just be willing to do the job. You must evince an all-consuming horniness for menial corporate tasks. In an American labor market where wages are stagnant and many workers feel their jobs seeping into their personal time, such demands only create even more anxiety and dread for Americans looking for a new gig.

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According to Peter Cappelli, the director of the Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania, modern job listings tend to perpetuate the myth that only slavishly devoted employees are valuable. But this notion often makes workplaces worse, he says: “[Hiring managers] are not thinking much about the culture of organizations. Folks are stuck in this idea of just wanting a bunch of ‘A’ players or the really great individual performers.”

Dauntingly vague language can fail to net the ultra-dedicated candidates employers are trying to attract, Cappelli notes. Asking applicants whether they’re obsessed or passionate is unlikely to extract any useful information to evaluate them. “It’s not as if someone is going to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I really don’t care about this at all,’” he says.

Companies that use these job descriptors sometimes realize they might sound odd. But some companies contend that the language is crucial for team culture, not ignorant of it. “The ‘Customer Service Hero’ job title isn’t to stand out from other companies; it’s not clickbait for talent,” Shaya Fidel, who works in human resources at Autodesk, told me over email. “When we first created the ‘Hero’ position, we wanted the job title to reinforce that customer support is the lifeblood of everything we do.”

Samantha Intagliata, Alley’s director of marketing, told me the old way just wouldn’t be appropriate: “We believe if we went the traditional route of just listing out skills and experience, it wouldn’t represent who we are as a company or the individuals who work for us.”

If creative language is in fact a window into a company’s culture, the tireless-ninja mind-set still might hurt some workers more than others, though. “You wind up with a combination of a gender skew and an age skew when you use these fanciful terms,” says Ian Siegel, the CEO of the online job marketplace ZipRecruiter. Older, more experienced professionals are generally turned off by employers looking for extremists, as are parents. “You’re going to get mostly young men,” Siegel says.