When someone leaves your business and you find yourself with a vacancy to fill you have an opportunity to review the job role and make sure the role is the same as it has been or now includes more or less responsibilities? Has technology made a difference to how the role is performed, are any different skills needed? Sometimes, by having the opportunity to review, you may realise it’s time to think about a new role that’s needed within your business.
Either way, before you start to recruit you will need a detailed job description that will help to not only define the role and recruit the best person for the job but is a document that you can use throughout someone’s employment. A well written job description is crucial if you are going to attract the best talent to join your team.
Keep It Real
Your job description should detail the purpose, tasks and responsibilities of the job and be an accurate reflection of the work involved. That’s the same for job title, for example, Transparency Enhancement Facilitator? No, call it Window Cleaner!
Job Description Framework
These are the things to include:
Title of the job.
Where the role sits within the team, department and wider business
Who the role reports to
Purpose of the job
Key areas of responsibility, main duties, and key results areas
Responsible for
Responsible to (reporting relationship).
When you are listing the main tasks of the job use active verbs such as analysing, reporting, repairing – rather than “dealing with” or “coordinating”; describe what the person will actually to be doing.
It’s important to expand a little on these main tasks, such as “analysing and reporting to Sales Manager on sales figures using the CRM system”
Try and convey who you are as a business, what are your values, what is the culture? It all helps potential new recruits to see themselves working in the role!
Avoid using jargon or terminology that is only known within your company. For example – we use CRM reporting as an example earlier. If your company database is called ‘OSCAR’ within the business, don’t say using ‘OSCAR’ to produce company reports’, potential candidates will have no idea who – or what – OSCAR is!
Review
Review regularly, annually ideally. Your business is ever changing and so job description need to reflect this and the changes that brings and as we mentioned earlier, good job descriptions can be invaluable in not only attracting and recruiting your new employee but for use during reviews/appraisals and supporting, developing and retaining your employees.
