In many ways writing a job description and then trying to recruit for that job is not unlike posting online for a partner.
You give your needs (required skills), your wishes (great to have), and your dreams (special skills). But that’s not enough.
Many organizations use a job description as a guideline or outline that will be “filled in when they start working”, and “we’ll flush out their skillsets and then add it to the job description”.
This is what happened at an organization I worked at around 12 years ago.
A detailed job posting with an even more detailed job description showed all the different things the position would be doing – to help one committee (of more than 20) within a membership organization. What they hired was someone who could do everything in the whole job description in 2 hours a week. Then what? Then you had someone being paid to do 40 hours of work sitting around finding more things for themselves to do.
What’s the fix?
~ Try it out with someone else, ask other staff to look at the job to see if they can understand what that person would be doing – you’d be surprised how quickly people would say – “is that all they do?“ ~
~ Consider a job description that maps out how much time in a day/week/month that task would be related to their job. ~
~ Be specific as to the role and its relevancy to the organization. ~
The good news is – the individual was a professional. They took on this job, plus added multiple other duties to fill their time. After 10 years they walked away with way more than just one job’s experience.
