How To Write A Job Description: Full Guide

Ensuring that you have a complete understanding of vacancy requirements will help you to find the best fit for the available job. 

This blog post will tell you how to write a job description or brief - a document that identifies information about your vacancy, ideal candidate, and value proposition.

What is a job brief? What is it important for recruitment?

The job brief is a significant recruitment tool you can benefit from. It serves as a roadmap and provides information about the essential characteristics of a position in the company and is the basis for the requirements profile. 

If you still have questions how to create job descriptions, then keep in mind the main features of written job descriptions:

• company/project and job title
• daily responsibilities and tasks
• experience and skills
• key personality and behavioral attributes
• benefits provided by the company/project

A job brief will allow you to have a comprehensive understanding of a vacancy and weed out irrelevant candidates. 

Typically, creating of a complete job brief requires the participation of the responsible team members and project managers with whom the future employee will work. This way you will get a comprehensive job brief and share the responsibility for hiring.

How to write a good job description?

The speed and quality of hiring depend on the detailed developed and filled job description. How to write a good job description?

Include more than general questions. Yes, you need to understand the standard requirements for a candidate (knowledge, abilities, skills, education, experience) and get a competency matrix with specific indicators that show what kind of behavior a manager expects at work.  How to create job descriptions perfectly? Try to dig deeper and sew options into the job that will attract the right people, go ahead and ask:

Information about the company and/or project.

‍Written job description must include all the relevant information about the company, its experience in the market, and its position among the competitors. If you deal with the project, indicate the field specifics, team, methodology of work, and technology stack.

• company / project history and company’s customers
• company’s competitors, their advantages and disadvantages
• team members and their roles
• methodology and technologies
• main tools used in the work

Information about a job.

‍Imagine that this is how to write a job summary. Find out how and when the vacancy appeared, whether it was closed in the recent past, and if so, for what reason it is open again. Determine the main role of the person in this job.

• purpose of a job
• reasons for creating a job vacancy
• the most interesting thing about working in this position

Daily responsibilities and tasks.

Point out the functionality in detail in the written job description. For example, developer vacancies often contain the following wording: “support the system”, “develop new features”, and “conduct a code review”. This does not give an understanding of what skills are needed and does not attract specialists. You need details and specifics.

• role, tasks, and powers of the employee 
• division of responsibility areas among a new employee and a team  
• evaluation of employee’s performance and its criteria

Experience and skills.

‍When creating a job description, specify all the requirements for the candidate: education, work experience, hard and soft skills. Pay more attention to soft skills since they are what distinguish the applicant from other professionals.

• necessary education and background
• required competencies of the candidate 
• other skill options
• "red flags" of characteristics of a job applicant

Key personality and behavioral attributes.

 Despite all the competencies of the candidate, their personal qualities play an equally important role. To create a job description, consider such points as communication skills, positive attitude, teamwork or individualism, and so on.

• expected attitude to work 
• the most important qualities of a job applicant
• career goals of a candidate
• general characteristics (communication skills, writing skills, ability to delegate, motivation, etc.)

Benefits the company proposes to a candidate.

“Interesting project”, “large-scale tasks”, and “complex integrations” - these abstract descriptions do not tell candidates anything. Include specific metrics and technologies in the written job description that will indicate what interesting, large-scale, and complex benefits you offer employees.

• salary options
• specifics of the corporate culture
• career opportunities for horizontal or vertical development
• benefits provided by the company 

Arrange all of the above points in the job brief summary. This will help to more accurately identify the desired criteria, not lose important requirements, and develop job description successfully. A written brief will allow you to remove possible disagreements in the future. You will have something to rely on when answering questions about why you offer these particular applicants.

How to simplify the recruitment process?

Creating a job description is a fundamental task for a recruiter and the entire recruitment department since the quality and speed of finding employees in a company depends thereon. This process needs a lot of time. But how to make sure that the quality of other routine work, which is also inevitable, does not suffer?

The way out in this situation is a recruitment platform. What does it mean? It is an effective software tool used to streamline or automate some parts of the recruitment workflow including functions such as sourcing, selecting, screening, and interviewing candidates. You can get your time on the creation of perfect job briefs while the platform automates your daily routine tasks.

Axterior is a professional recruitment platform that allows companies and recruitment teams to source, manage, and hire the best talents with less time and effort, grow their talent pools, and improve their ROI on recruitment. 

Simplify the job description creation with Job Description AI Generation!

Conclusion 

We hope that you have understood ow to write a job description correctly! It’s bad when few candidates apply for a vacancy, since there is no one to choose from. It’s not better when the flow is large, but everyone doesn’t fit - you have to process a wave of applications. To develop a job description means to attract not the maximum number of responses to the vacancy, but the maximum number of relevant candidates. And, the recruitment platform will simplify your daily tasks and provide more time for creativity.