writing a job description

For an employer writing an effective job description is as important as writing a cover letter for an employee because these two documents meant to fetch the attention of the reviewer. Good job candidates shows there interest in any job only when they find the job description effective. It helps employees understand their responsibilities, evaluating employees’ performance, skills & qualification required for the job, salary range and much more. Here are tips on how to write a job description effectively?

When we sit to write a job description the first thing that comes to our mind is “where to begin”, “what to write & what should we skip”. Really writing a job description is not as easy task as it seems to be, after all your expectations with your prospective employee is mainly depends on this document & I’m sure you won’t like to miss anything which your future plans are depends on.

When you start writing a JD think about your long term plans & even the short ones, keep in mind what you want to accomplished by adding up new employee in your team, it will be natural to see how a new employee fits into that matrix.

Steps to write a Job description

Define the position. This should be the first step before you start heading towards writing a job description. Define everything you want in the new hire, think about what responsibilities you want to assign to the new hire & what job title suits best for that.

• Now give a suitable title to the position & write about responsibilities. This way candidate will get a clear picture if he fits in the position. Make title interesting & straight forward as well which can easily communicate what the position is all about.
• List between 10-15 key responsibilities; make sure the responsibilities you write should be clear & concise. Try to cover up as much information as possible about what you’re expecting from the candidate & what are your future expectations from the employee.
• Try also including what percentage of a particular responsibility encompass the total job.

List required skills & qualification. Once you’re done defining the job title & have written down the responsibilities for the job, the next part come to list required skills & qualification for the job. This is another most important part of job description because it gives candidate an idea if he is fit for the job & should he apply for the job or not? Be specific when you list about the skill for the job. Must analyze the job properly before you define what skills are required to do that job. Some jobs required some specific qualification & training.  Don’t forgot to mention them as well because when you mention them candidate having those qualification & training apply for the job with even more confidence. In this section you can write some skills which are although not much important for the job but you prefer candidate have those skills for future point of view.

Write how to apply instructions. Now you’ve write down the important part of job description, now it’s time to instruct candidate how he can apply for the job. In this section must include your email ID & phone number. You should also mention your website in this section so that candidate can also get some idea about your business as well before he applies.

What Else? Now your Job Description is almost done & it’s time to think if you’ve missed something or not. What else you should write to give more clarity to the candidate. There are few things you can further add to this e.g Company Profile, Whom the candidate will report to, Company Mission etc.

Everyone wants to work for a company which gives him a stable job & fun environment. Adding company profile & mission statement in the job description gives some sense to the candidate if the company will be write for him or not.

You may also include some instructions about resume & cover letter or can give a dead line about the application submission.

Hope this article will make some sense to you & will help you writing a better job description.

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