Is Your Job Description Full of Scrap?

A colleague, Zack, sent me a job announcement describing a role in his company he thought I’d be perfect for.

As usual with job announcements people forward to you, the one Zack sent had nothing to do with my interests, experience, or skillset. Apparently, my unique strengths don’t shine very brightly.

One bullet point in the Qualifications section of the document drew my attention. This employer sought a “humble, scrappy, self-starter.”

Set aside for the moment that I’m not humble, and “self-starter” is an employer euphemism for “inadequate training.” (See my post, Job Postings: What They Say vs. What They Really Mean).

My big question was…

Scrappy?

Scrappy?!!

I knew the word, but never considered what it means. I was, nevertheless, confident it didn’t describe me. No one’s every called me scrappy.

“Please, Sir. I Want Some More.”

Either way, it struck me as a peculiar word to find in a job announcement. I started polling friends and colleagues about their interpretation:

“If you saw scrappy in a job posting, what trait would you think it describes?”

Everyone’s answer started with the same perplexed request for confirmation: “Scrappy?”

The implication was always, “Makes no sense in a job description.”

No one said, “Yeah, of course. I see scrappy in business all the time.”

The sum of their responses created a picture of scrappiness: someone willing to tussle (tussle, interestingly, came up repeatedly). Fighting was a recurring theme — sometimes in a David-beats-Goliath sense. One person said it made them think of Oliver Twist. The words ragged, dirty, little, and desperate got honorable mentions.

I decided it may’ve been a typo. Maybe the employer wanted someone who likes hip-hop, and they meant rappy. Maybe they wanted software development skills, and meant appy. Don’t even get me started on pappy.

Incomplete Parts

More recently, I saw a LinkedIn post by a CEO I admire. She was sharing something an employee on her team had written boasting their company “still has the energy of a young startup — we’re really scrappy.”

A clue! It’s an energetic young start-up thing. (Could scrappy be an ageist dog-whistle? No way. These young companies thrive on inclusiveness — it says so right there in their job descriptions.)

I Googled scrappy (confesh: I searched the definition of tussle, too. Yeah, I spend too much time looking up words).

Oxford Dictionary’s primary definition of scrappy is:

…consisting of disorganized, untidy, or incomplete parts.

Not gonna lie… If I saw a job announcement looking for someone who consists of disorganized, untidy, or incomplete parts, I’d apply in no time flat. “Incomplete parts” is my superpower.

I went on to Merriam Webster:

consisting of scraps

This might make sense if the job was Director of Employees Banished for Nonconformity — y’know, the Department of Misfits that every organization has cloistered away in some remote office.

Other Merriam Webster defs:

1: Quarrelsome

2: having an aggressive and determined spirit: FEISTY

Now we’re getting somewhere.

And we get even closer by turning to the paramount arbiter of usage, Urban Dictionary, which defines scrappy as…

seemingly small and unthreatening but shockingly able to kick your ass and anyone else’s.

Aha!

Through the Looking Glass

Employers are likely to say they intend scrappy to mean “resourceful” or “resilient.” But if no one knows that’s what they intend it to mean… then that’s not what it means — unless your boss is Humpty Dumpty, that hard-boiled paymaster who, in Through the Looking Glass, asserts:

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

(At least Mr. Dumpty, when making a word “do a lot of work,” could brag: “I always pay it extra.”)

As it turns out, I may have missed the memo officially entering “scrappy” into the annals of organizational jargon. A snapshot from Google’s Ngram Viewer shows that authors have been getting their scrap on:

The Scrapometer

Indeed, once I got past the dictionary definitions, I discovered that scrappy has tussled its way into the business lexicon. In 9 Ways to Stay Scrappy in Business, a Forbes contributor in 2013 wrote,

Being scrappy means committing to a result at all costs, and doing whatever it takes to get that result.

A ThriveGlobal blog post, Building a Scrappy Mindset, published years later duplicated these exact words (seriously, the same exact words… because “doing whatever it takes” means you can take whatever others are doing) .

And this is probably what Zack’s company wanted in their humble scrappy self-starter: someone committed to a result at all costs.

When the smoke clears from all the talk of psychological safety and inclusiveness, some employers just want ass-kicking, scrappy Hunger Game champions.

So, next time you submit a job application to an employer that values scrap, fill it with scrappy keywords and include a scrappy cover letter to explain how you’re small but shockingly able to kick anyone’s ass.

And may the odds be ever in your favor.