How To Improve Hiring Practices By Writing Better Job Descriptions

When a job opens up, it can sometimes become a whirlwind of disorganized steps to fill the position. Things can get crazy quickly, so most people just throw a quick job description together, post it online, and hope for the best. But the job description is a critical piece of effective hiring practices – without the right information and language, your star candidate might not even be bothered to apply for the job.

Most of us don’t have time to spend hours crafting the perfect job description, so I’ve put together a template that should only take about 20 minutes to put together. Based on advice from the job posting experts over at LinkedIn, here’s an outline that you can use to quickly improve hiring practices and pump out a job description in record time. For the purpose of this blog, I’ve created a job description for my own role.

Job Title

Pretty self-explanatory. I’m a Client Success Manager. What’s the position you’re hiring for?

Description

This is where you describe the problem or opportunity that the role is designed to address. Effective hiring practices suggest that this section should identify a purpose for the role existing – something that’s engaging and transparent about the real-life experiences in this position.

This role is designed to help our clients implement tools so that they can effectively hire the right people, coach and develop their employees, as well as improve team effectiveness. Your clients will be companies of all different sizes and will have a variety of needs to address. You will be their main point of contact for everything, from onboarding and training to support and consultation.

A Day In The Life

Most job descriptions I see don’t have this section. To improve hiring practices, start adding in a quick bulleted list of what a candidate’s day might look like. I’ve made it conversational to add some personality and fun.

• Come in and sit down with your coffee or tea. There are lots of great coffee shops around but our back-end developer also puts on a pot of delicious smelling hazelnut coffee every morning. (Consider adding some human elements to reveal a bit of your company culture)
• Check your voicemails and emails to respond to client requests or questions – this is your main priority and these will come in throughout the day.
• Review your list of clients in the onboarding phase and follow up if necessary.
• Attend a team meeting to know what’s going on throughout the company, celebrate everyone’s wins and collaborate on challenges. (Reinforce your culture where possible)
• Take a walk at lunch to get some fresh air! (Don’t forget to demonstrate your support for work-life balance)
• Get creative by contributing to our library of content designed to assist our customers even further. (Offer glimpses into where else an employee might contribute to the success of the company, so deviation from day-to-day tasks isn’t a surprise)
• Go home, workout, relax and get a great night’s sleep! Our benefits package includes financial assistance toward a gym membership of your choice. (See how I snuck a perk in there?)

You, The Candidate

Effective hiring practices suggest that a description of the ideal employee can help self-aware candidates decide if they have the right personality for the job. All I did for this section was copy and paste from a McQuaig Job Survey Report. If you have a personality profile created for the role, you can take the language right out of the report – if you don’t have a tool to create job profiles, implementing one is a great way to quickly improve hiring practices and speed up the process. A bulleted list keeps it easy to read, and the language from the Job Survey Report speaks directly to the candidate: You, the candidate…

• Are friendly, sociable and outgoing
• Are a good communicator
• Genuinely like people and enjoy working with them
• Have a sense of urgency to get things done quickly
• Are good with detail and take your duties seriously
• Are a very good team member who will be careful about making decisions
• Are very conscientious and cooperative

Remember that each section of your post should give candidates a clear sense of the environment they’ll be walking into, so don’t be afraid to use humour or include language that’s commonly used by employees. Make sure it reads the way your company culture feels.

There you have it! By keeping this job description short, conversational, and leveraging the personality profile already created, you can get that posting up in 20 minutes or less! It’s an easy win if you’re looking to improve hiring practices, and the results might surprise you. Good luck on your next employee search!