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Job Descriptions

This week’s material really highlighted how important job descriptions are, but also how tricky they can be to get right. From my own experience, I’ve seen firsthand some of the challenges that come with developing, maintaining, or even not having job descriptions at all.

One example that sticks out is when I applied for a job at Papa Murphy’s. They didn’t really provide a job description, it was basically just “hiring now” post online. Even though there wasn’t anything written out, I could at least figure out that I’d be making pizzas and working in a food service environment. It wasn’t ideal, but because the job was simple and straightforward, it wasn’t a huge deal.

More recently, though, I’ve seen how much harder it can be when jobs are more complex. When I was applying for Project Engineer positions, the job descriptions were often really vague. They would list out general terms like “project coordination” or “support project management activities” without really explaining what that would look like day-to-day. On top of that, they used a lot of industry terminology that I didn’t fully understand yet. It made it difficult to tell what was actually expected of me, and sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was qualified or not.

This shows one big challenge of maintaining good job descriptions: as roles grow and industries evolve, it’s easy for descriptions to become either outdated or too broad. And when they aren’t clear, it leaves candidates confused, frustrated, or even misaligned once they’re hired.

Overall, I think this week’s material really emphasized that investing time into clear, updated job descriptions isn’t just a formality but rather it’s a big part of making sure people are set up to succeed from day one.