I read a lot of Chief of Staff job descriptions. Not by choice. The way some people are pulled into watching a slow-motion car crash on the highway, I am pulled into LinkedIn job postings.

And almost every one of them is, in some way, telling on itself. (And often feels like I’m reading the equivalent of a slow-motion car crash on the highway.)

The job description is the X-ray. Before a single resume comes in, before a single interview gets scheduled, before someone’s spouse is asked to relocate, the JD has already told me whether the role is going to work. Most of the time, it won’t. How do I know?

Here are the top five tells. If your draft contains any of them, the problem isn’t your candidate pool. The problem is upstream of your candidate pool.

There is a category of job posting where the title has been carefully, lovingly, deliberately constructed to be Anything Other Than Chief of Staff. Sometimes it’s aspirational—Chief Vibe Officer, Chief of Awesome, Head of Magic, Chief Unicorn. Sometimes it’s evasive like Right Hand to the CEO, Strategic Partner to the Founder, Special Projects Lead. Sometimes it’s the corporate fan-fiction version of CoS, like Director of Strategy & Operations, VP of the Office of the CEO, Business Operations Generalist.

All of these are the same job. Or rather, all of these are the same attempt to dress up the same job in Lululemon and call it a day.  And the athleisure wear is always covering one of two things.

Door Number One: you think “Chief of Staff” sounds too corporate, too political, too suit-and-tie for your culture, and you’ve decided that calling someone Chief Vibe Officer will fix that. Guess what? It will not.

The vibe in question is going to be “the person who absorbs all incoming chaos so the founder doesn’t have to,” and there is no amount of branding that makes that vibe fun. You are going to hire a person, give them a cute title, and watch their LinkedIn quietly update to “Chief of Staff” within four months because the recruiters calling them have no idea what a Chief Vibe Officer does.

Door Number Two (which is worse):