This Job Ad Went Viral After It Targeted And Insulted Millenials

A South London theater posted a controversial job listing on the hiring website ArtsJobs.

The post, attributed to the Tea House Theatre, takes aim at millennials for their poor work ethic.

While the post quickly disappeared from ArtsJobs, screenshots of the listing went viral. The job apparently pays between £15,000 and £20,000 (about $20,000 to $26,000 USD).

The ad clearly intends to put the millennial generation to work, but some critics say that the theater might be partly responsible for the position’s high turnover rate. After all, the job doesn’t pay well and has confusing duties.

The original post notes that ideal applicants will need “office skills, the ability to run a paper filing system as well as a computerised one, the ability to complete and keep track of a huge to-do list, to make our office work, create and develop business management systems that help the business to grow, giving space for more creative work to go ahead.”

Noting that “one old lady used to run the whole of Mountview Academy with an IBM computer,” the listing concludes by saying that the directors “have not been impressed so far.”

In short, the ad is not very fair. To many millennials, it’s symptomatic of the current job market; employers want highly qualified, skilled workers, but they’re not willing to pay a fair wage.

For their part, ArtsJobs quickly removed the advertisement, noting that it discriminates on the basis of age.

“We’re aware of a job that was posted on ArtsJobs that breached our terms (in this case targeting a specific age group),” the site wrote on Twitter. “ArtsJobs is made up of user generated content and this job advert has now been removed.”

Read the full letter below.

Dear Millenials [sic],

As a professional company in the arts industry for the best part of twenty years, grafting, scraping, cap in hand to angels and funding bodies and occasionally getting lucky. Surviving on our box office, breaking even and revelling in the success that in the real world that is. It saddens me to be putting this advert up for the third time in as many months.

Are you just not taught anything about existing in the real world, where every penny counts. Did no one teach you that the end of your studies is the beginning of your education?

We are still here, after all these years. We run a venue in South Central London, we run as a receiving house, producing house. We have an outdoor events company putting on festivals on the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. We have been lucky enough to have been funded on several occasions in the last five years by Arts Council England for our outdoor projects, but the bulk of the funding for the art in and around our venue comes from the venue itself. We raise our own money by running a successful business alongside and intrinsically part of our art. We opened in a recession and are about to embark on a number of major projects.

One old lady used to run the whole of Mountview Academy with an IBM computer, it shouldn’t be this hard.

We need a grafter, who can commit. The absolute dogs in office skills, the ability to run a paper filing system as well as a computerised one, the ability to complete and keep track of a huge to-do list, to make our office work, create and develop business management systems that help the business to grow, giving space for more creative work to go ahead. To see where we are headed and realise that it is in your own hands how far you are able to go with us as we grow.

We have not been impressed so far.

Yours sincerely

HG Iggulden & IF Rushton

Directors

Tea House Theatre ltd