Job descriptions no longer link away

A job description arrives here from someone else’s site, and plenty of those sites treat the body as advertising space. Aggregators that mirror a posting end it with a line back to themselves — Find Jobs in Germany on Arbeitnow — and rewrite each mention of the hiring company into a link to their own page for it. Other postings paste a raw apply-URL into the middle of a paragraph and leave it there.

None of that is the employer’s text. Descriptions now carry no links at all. The words survive; only the destinations are gone.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A link woven through a sentence — “we run Kubernetes in production” — keeps its word, because deleting the text along with the tag would leave a hole in the sentence. What does get removed entirely is the kind of link whose visible text was only ever its own address: strip the destination from https://boards.example.com/apply/1 and what’s left isn’t a sentence, it’s a dead string. Those go, along with the empty paragraph they were sitting in.

You lose nothing you were using. The Apply button has always pointed at the employer’s own posting, and it still does — the description was never the way out. What you get back is a body that reads as what it is: the role, the requirements, the team. Not a set of exits to somebody else’s job board.

There’s a quieter reason too. The assistant and the fit analysis read these descriptions, and until now they read whatever a third-party posting chose to put in front of them, links included. Text that arrives from a stranger’s server should stay text.

This applies to every source in the catalogue, old postings included — not just the ones crawled from today on.