HR MATTERS: Creating the Very Best Job Description to Shorten Your Hiring Process and Find the Ideal Candidate

In a previous job, I spent a lot of time hiring people - because of growth and turnover it felt like we were constantly hiring.  Since then I’ve consulted many people on hiring. As a result, I’ve written and read a lot of job descriptions and I gotta tell you, most of us could use some improvement in this area. If the goal is to have the best of the best apply for your jobs and have a relatively seamless interview process, you have to create a strong job description.

5 Tips to Writing The Very Best Job Description

Describe yourself and the workplace. Future applicants want to see how you describe yourself, you might not want to simply copy + paste your “about” section from your website. Anyone worth interviewing will do a search on the internet before they apply so use your job description as an opportunity to use your internal office voice to describe the impact you make with your work. 

What’s the job?  This is the nitty gritty of the job you are hiring for, be concise but don’t skimp here. What will this position be doing? Feel free to categorize and break down responsibilities. What are the non-obvious aspects of the job that would be important for an applicant to know, examples might include travel, atypical schedule, supervisory roles etc. Be realistic. No really, you are setting everyone up if the job is impossible to do.

In my experience this is where most job descriptions are the strongest. It’s important to paint a clear description so applicants are very clear what they are applying to do.

In order for this new hire to be successful what do they need to walk in the door with? Fair warning, this is where I’ve seen lots of applications fall short. I’m going to be upfront—unicorns don’t really exist and you can’t have it all. Be clear with yourself about what are absolute musts and what would be an added bonus and make it crystal clear on your description. If you are hiring for an administrative assistant, experience in Excel might be non-negotiable, great, make sure you make that clear in the post. On the flip side, if you can envision a scenario where you hire an applicant who has every single other thing on your list besides Excel, it’s not a requirement, it’s a desired qualification. It’s okay to have mostly desired qualifications.

A good rule of thumb is that if you read the required qualifications and start to feel incredible dread in your gut because finding the right person seems impossible, it probably is and you should either cut down your list or plan to hire an outside consultant to do your outreach and hiring.

Sell yourself. Why would I want to apply for your job? Do you offer great benefits? A fun workplace? Remote working? Free meals? A discount? Non-profits, I love you, but “working for a good cause” is not enough! You want the very best applicants to apply to work for you, be competitive in your description.  You are selling them as much as they need to sell you.

Be transparent about the process and salary up front. Save yourself time and energy and just tell people how much you plan to pay and how they need to apply. How many interviews have I sat through where I wasted my time and the applicant’s time because we were on totally different pages about salary? TOO MANY. Let’s be honest, we work for pay, why wouldn’t you be up front about that from the very beginning?

As you can tell, writing job descriptions takes time and requires review before you post them publicly. A thorough job description can serve as the base for a work plan once your new hire is onboarding which will save you time and ensure your new hire hits the ground running. It’s worth it to do the work upfront—it will save you time in the long run. I promise!

We’re experts at writing winning job descriptions at The Spark Mill and delight in helping our clients find the very best person to hire. Contact us for all your hiring needs.

*This blog post is the first in a series about hiring—look out for the next installment discussing how to put equitable hiring in practice. If you have a topic you want to hear about, let us know!