A well written job description will provide employees with a solid understanding of their responsibilities and can become a useful document for future recruitment and performance management processes.

In our last post and we discussed WHY you need a job description. In this post we’re going to give you some tips on HOW to write a professional job description that can be used across many areas of your business.

Job title

A good job title will accurately reflect the nature of the job and the duties being performed, and should be self-explanatory for recruitment and advertising search purposes. So try not to get too fancy or complicated here!

Duties

The job description should contain a list of the duties and responsibilities associated with the role, along with an outline of what duties take priority. The duties should be to the point and listed in bullet point form for clear easy reading.

You should also consider what results or outcomes you are expecting the employee to achieve and if they are in a managerial role what is the extent of their authority?

Skills, qualifications and attributes

For recruitment and performance management purposes you should also include the skills, attributes and qualifications required to successfully perform in the role. These areas should be listed separately to avoid any confusion.

• Skills are tasks that the candidate is capable of completing based on what they have learned in the past.
• Qualifications relate to what education or training the candidate needs in order to do the job.
• Attributes are personality based characteristics such as attitude, leadership abilities and confidence.

Relationships

Employees need to know where they sit within a business and how they fit into the rest of the team.

Who the candidate reports to, who reports to them and who is working alongside them should be outlined in the job description. Providing them with an organisational chart is also good way to explain this.

Salary

After assessing their duties and responsibilities it’s important to define a salary range that is competitive and realistically matches their duties and responsibilities. You should also state if you are offering a Full time, part time or casual position, what the standard hours of work are and any other requirements such as regular travel.

So that’s it! 5 key points to consider when creating a job description.