Before you do anything – STOP!
It is vital that before you start you know EXACTLY what you are looking for and that all the stakeholders involved are 
on the same page.
So quite simply the first thing to do is.... invest some quality time up front on defining an accurate job description and a clear “skills profile” for the person you are looking to recruit.
It may sound like the most obvious thing in the world but it is absolutely vital to allow you to look and find the right qualities in your candidates, and importantly the candidates know exactly what they’re applying for.
Spending a little longer on a job description and “skills profile” will save you hours sifting through unqualified applications, interviewing the wrong type of candidates and disagreeing with other interviewers on who best fits a loose, hastily thrown together job description.
So what is the key to a clear, meaningful job specification and what should you cover?
Job Title
This may seem like stating the obvious, but avoid “in house” terminology. If you have “Client Development Managers” in your business, but the rest of the world calls them “Account Managers” then for the purposes of attracting candidates use the terminology that’s recognised.
Location
Remember where a role is based and where the candidate will be working can be completely different – be absolutely clear, in so far as you can, as to what the split of a candidates time will be across locations.
Reports and line managers
Get this nailed down, as this will also define who the key stakeholders are in the interview process. Ultimately this will also define who should be given most counsel in the final recruitment decision.
Role Summary
There is a temptation here to over expand what the role is. The vacancies that attract the best candidates are those that are the easiest to communicate. It is quite a challenge, aim to keep this to one crisp sentence, as a maximum no more than two.
Key Responsibilities
This is the most important part of the job description, not only for the candidate, but also for everyone in the interview process. (Remember though there is no point re-inventing the wheel, so if you already have standard job descriptions for common organisation roles don’t stray too far from these).
If you are starting from scratch then go through the following process:
- Brainstorm just about every aspect of the job you can think of, consider any and all of the following – and remember this is an indicative not an exhaustive list: inputs/outputs, staff, qualifications, territories, processes, planning, managing material and financial resources, 360 degree communication, people management, product knowledge, premises, equipment, who they are engaging with internally and externally, deliverables, time.
- Now group these up into key responsibilities – realistically unless it is a senior role you should end up with no more than say 8 bullet points
- Now rate and rank these in order of importance. Again it is key that all the right stakeholders within your business are in agreement here.
- Importantly if you have someone who is already performing a similar role well then get them to take time out to “review and red pen” the role for you.
- Finally, draw breath one more time and review what you have. Is everything on the list that should be, don’t clutter or puff it out with things that are not genuinely important to the role. Also ask yourself the question is the role set out achievable?
With more senior roles its worth breaking the key responsibilities into functional areas eg Operations, Management, Organisational etc. This said even with the more senior roles try to keep this to no more than 12-15 bullet points.
Finally, remember with regards to targets if you are going to include them then be very specific – a target is simply an output of everything else you have put in the job description. Remember the job description must stand on its own merits to describe the activities required to ensure that the target will be hit!
To restate time spent up front getting this first step right will repay you fourfold further down the line. Even more importantly it will help sharpen your ability to spot the right candidate when they walk through the door - you will have an objective and practical yardstick to compare people by and without fail even the unsuccessful candidates will respect you and your company for that!
This is the first in a series of “common sense” recruitment tips. Next time we’ll be looking at where to place the job advert to attract the best candidate traffic for your vacancy.
Chris Smith is the founder of yourpeoplemarket.com a game changing, free to use, fixed fee recruitment marketplace – where you can engage with agencies at a fee you set or less and only ever pay on success.
Before this Chris was Joint Founder of ecrmpeople, which over a seven year period he took from being a start-up to a £12m company.