Job descriptions support recruiting, organizational design, and performance management (Week 4 Lectures). I’ve used them for recruiting as well as personnel management projects, such as shifting headcount from one place to another or justifying a department-wide promotion.The greatest challenge with maintaining job descriptions is ensuring accuracy and the right level of detail.
A job description needs to be updated regularly, particularly where business context and needs change rapidly, which is certainly the case where I work. We tend to update job descriptions when we hire new talent, and when we go through an organizational shift; the descriptions supplement the org chart. I recommend this approach; the job description “drill-down” ensures shared understanding and gives a fresher launching-off point for hiring than a job description used for a job posting that may be several years stale.
Ensuring the right level of detail is more challenging. The basic descriptions of a functional area or job level maintained by a large company’s HR department might be so high-level as to be useless in day-to-day recruitment and performance management, but if a job description is too detailed, a new hire may feel baited and switched if the demands of their job shift from what was on the posting.
To manage this complexity, I recommend tying examples of daily tasks to the requisite skills, knowledge, or talents required for success. First, Break All The Rules described how managers should think about the many facets that comprise a person’s approach to their work (skills, knowledge, talents, attitudes, etc.).
This brings me to another point: When writing a job description, be sure that the basic and preferred qualifications are the truth! If you make basic qualifications too aspirational, you will inadvertently screen out highly talented candidates. The right person can easily acquire knowledge, skills, or requisite certifications; the wrong person cannot cultivate talents (FBATR, Chapter 3). Experience can be fungible, skills transferable; think not only about the single person you need to hire when you’re writing a job description for a posting, but also the pool of candidates you’d like to cultivate from which to make your selection.