Why Your Job Description Matters!

At the heart of an organization’s people processes is the often overlooked and undervalued job description. Job descriptions can serve as a critical foundation for several people focused areas that span the entire employee life cycle including Talent Acquisition, Compensation, Legal Compliance, Employee Engagement, Talent Management and Workforce Planning. When working with clients we often find that job descriptions either do not exist or there is not a consistent and organized discipline for job descriptions resulting in job descriptions that are in a variety of formats, are not fully completed, are poorly written and/or there is not a central owner of the job descriptions to ensure consistency and maintenance of job descriptions over time.

An organization with well written job descriptions and clearly defined processes and practices for defining and maintaining job descriptions will recognize several benefits that can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of people processes thereby saving time and money. Good job descriptions can enhance a company’s recruitment and selection process by helping organizations define positions and then select the best fit candidates based on those criteria. They provide a better baseline for compensation analysis as they allow companies to ensure they are making the best comparisons to market pricing for jobs. Thorough, well written job descriptions can help an organization from a legal compliance perspective specifically with FLSA and ADA. In particular, job descriptions help organizations support exemption status determinations and define physical requirements for jobs to support ADA compliance. Job descriptions also provide a foundation for setting clear performance expectations, developing career paths and completing workforce planning. They provide an opportunity to further embed leadership objectives, culture initiatives and organizational values to support consistency across an organization in how managers lead and how employees live out and support an organization’s core values through their job responsibilities.

Here are some tips for creating job descriptions based on the questions that we frequently receive from clients.

• Job titles should clearly communicate the nature of the role allowing individuals outside an organization to also have a basic idea of the position that the job title represents.
• The job summary should be a clear and concise overview of the main responsibilities of the role. The summary should be no more than 3 to 4 sentences long. It should provide a high level of understanding of what a person in the role does.
• The job responsibilities section should clearly list out the key accountabilities of the role. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list that details every specific task of the position. Rather it is designed to give additional details on the main responsibilities of the role and what the role is accountable to achieve. The responsibilities list should also be understandable to those outside the organization as well. So do not use acronyms or jargon that only those inside the organization would understand. Ideally, job descriptions should contain no more than 10 to 15 responsibilities. Each statement should begin with an action verb and they should be listed in descending order in terms of importance or by percent of time spent.
• Within the requirements section of the job description you want to clearly outline the minimum abilities required for an individual to be able to successfully fulfill the essential functions of the role with or without accommodation. These capabilities can include communications (ability to read and write, etc.), technical/computer abilities (intermediate computer skills, ability to operate general office equipment, etc.), physical requirements (ability to lift a specified number of pounds, etc.) and work environment conditions (ability to work around moving mechanical parts, work in outdoor weather conditions, etc.).
• Education, skills and experience requirements should represent the minimum education, skills and experience required to perform the essential functions of the role. Preferred education, skills and experience for the role may also be indicated and should represent skills needed for high performance within the role. When setting requirements it is important to consider different types of education and/or experience that can be equivalent.

Developing well written job descriptions within a consistent framework is a valuable investment in building the foundation for people practices and processes that can have a more strategic impact to the organization. Investing time and energy can provide a great return on investment.