GUIDE TO DRAWING UP A JOB DESCRIPTION
1. Job title
A good job title will have the following qualities:
- It accurately reflects the nature of the job and the duties being performed.
- It reflects its ranking order with other jobs in your organisation.
- It is free of gender, age implications or other form of bias.
- It does not over-exaggerate the importance of the role.
- It is self-explanatory for online job searches; typically, the job title is the main keyword searched by candidates.
2. Purpose of Post
This should be a maximum of 2 or 3 sentences which outlines the overall responsibility of the postholder e.g. “The purpose of this post is to ensure the provision of an effective IT support service for all departments within the business”.
3. Duties
The job description should contain a list of the duties and responsibilities associated with the role. The list should be brief otherwise the document becomes an operational manual rather than a job description.
Descriptions of duties should be no more than two or three sentences in length and should be outcome-based e.g. “Prepare monthly reports to allow monitoring of the department’s budget”.
If there are specific projects that the postholder will be required to work on from time to time be sure to include these as they can provide variety to the role and show there is opportunity for growth and development - a factor which has been proven to be attractive to job applicants.
The jobholder’s responsibility for any specialist equipment or machinery should be included here, together with any budget / financial responsibilities.
Roles in smaller companies, e.g. Office Manager, may have more tasks associated with them, due to the ‘all round’ nature of the post, but you should still aim to keep your list to around 10 tasks and preferably less.
4. Relationships and Reporting Lines
It is important to include reporting lines and working relationships in your job description.
Reporting lines clarify the responsibilities of the position by showing who the candidate reports to and who reports to them.
Working relationships are the people and departments the jobholder will work closely with. Remember that this should also include responsibility for managing or working with suppliers, customers etc.
5. Salary
Rather than assigning a particular salary to the position work out a salary range to include in the job description that is competitive with similar positions in your own and other organisations, and allows for variations in qualifications or experience.
