The company for which I work, Tucows, has a job opening for an Integration Engineer. Here’s a very quick description of the job:
The successful
incumbentcandidate will have the challenging opportunity to work on Tucows’ vast and complex high availability system spread across multiple data centers, servers and operating systems. You’ll work with a dynamic team of Integration Engineers to develop, deploy and maintain components of a large scale hosted messaging platform. In addition, you will develop software components for our hosted messaging platform; liaise with third party suppliers in customizing applications for deployment on our high availability production environment; as well as contribute to ongoing process improvement of the SDLC.
For a full description, see this entry in the Tucows Blog.
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Having just read your recent post on torture, I thought this was a job opening for an "Interrogation Engineer" and I thought that was a pretty curious position for Tucows to advertise.
I love you, but please don't be part of using the word "incumbent" that way.
Incumbent got started in job ads as a way to describe what the old guy did when you didn't really have a good handle on what the job should be called: "The incumbent drinks a lot of coffee and fills out TPS reports. He's retiring next month and we need to hire someone to sit in his office." Now every HR person in the world seems to think it is a synonym for "job-seeker", which is precisely, exactly, wrong.
Stop it. Please.
Serves me right for not really looking at the copy! I simply cut and pasted it from documentation given to me.
I'll go have a word with HR and suggest that they use the word "candidate". I'll bet that since incumbents are also candidates in elections, some people think the words are synonyms.