How to write a job description

Here’s a handy template for job descriptions.

Writing job descriptions can be easy or hard depending on a number of factors. The main difficulty is likely specifying what someone in the role is expected to achieve. In other words, describing how the business benefits from hiring someone.

If you’re an engineer or engineering manager tasked with writing a job description, your only responsibility should be the role-specific material for one or more of the followin: Vision, Outcomes, Competencies, Responsibilities. Here’s the structure of a complete job description:

  • Company boilerplate: Ideally written by senior leadership to describe the company’s purpose, vision, value, culture and goals.

  • Team/Department boilerplate: Ideally written by the department lead. Similar to company boilerplate, describing the department’s vision, purpose and team culture.

  • The Role: this is what the hiring manager is responsible for.
    • Vision: summarize outcomes, responsibilities, competencies. Paint a vivid picture of the successful candidate’s achievements.
    • Outcomes: List what is expected to have been achieved.
    • Responsibilities: What needs to be done to achieve the outcomes.
    • Competencies/Skills: What is required for the responsibilities.
      • Necessary: list here,
      • Anciallary of supporting skills, nice to haves, Think strategically.
  • Team/Department closing boilerplate: Responsibility of department lead or HR.
  • Company closing boilerplate: HR is probably responsible for the text.
  • Compensation, etc. Set by senior leadership, HR will provide the text.

In the event you are the hiring manager, and HR, and senrior leadership, this is an excellent opportunity to nail done parts of the job description which won’t change from role to role.

When acting as the hiring manager for a role, I find it most efficient to start collect all the information in advance. Who are the stakeholder’s invested in the hire’s success, and what are their expectations? What are the day-to-day responsibilities the hire will assume stepping into the role? I may need to dig deeper into competencies and skills if the role is outside my area of technical expertise.

Gathering reqirements should be the hardest and most time consuming aspect of the process. Ideally, all the requirements should be gathered in advance, then it’s usually not too difficult to knock out the job description in a single session of writing, around 2 hours.

The HM’s responsibility

Let’s go a bit deeper into role-specific components.

Vision

The Vision is where you want to sell the role. Vividly describe the accomplishments of the successful candidate. Use emotionally powerful language. The right candidates need to feel the vision.

The ORCS

The Ourcomes, Responsibilities, Competencies, Skills framework is a simple way to both assess a job seeking candidate and provide growth plan for current employees. With respect to a job description, the framework helps clarify thinking and describing the open role. The definitions are congruent with current practices in Human Resources.

Outcomes

Outcomes are concrete, measurable achievements. Ideally, outcomes are derived from roadmaps of work deemed critital to business success. Roadmaps for this purpose may be informal, the important thing is having a guideline for what the role is intended on accomplishing before attempting to staff it.

For example, in a Technical Lead role for a softwate development team, the following are all concrete outcomes:

  • Shipped three business-critical improvements for the company’s product.
  • Decreased the team’s defect rate from 1 in 50 to 1 in 100.
  • Improved the performance of Component X by 15%.

For a job description, these same outcomes could be defined as follows:

  • Deliver business-critical features for the company’s product on a timely basis.
  • Continually improve the quality user exprerience by decreasing defects.
  • Improve performance of code within the team’s problem domain.

There is a difference between ``output’’ and outcome. Output is considered a measure of energy expended. It’s possible to spend of lot of energy which reaults in little business value, hence output is a poor measure.

Responsibilities

Driving to any outcome requires fulfilling a number of responsibilities. From the outcomes above, let’s consider the responsibilites for decreasing the defect rate:

  • Track the number of defects over time.
  • Fix the defects as they occur.
  • Incorporate learnings from the fixes back into team practices and code review.

These responsibilities are not conceptually difficult, but execution requires associated competencies and mastery of the relevant skills.

Competencies & Skills

Fulfilling responsibilties requires being able to actually perform the work, or having the capability to get the work done.

A competency is the ability to use collection of related by different skills to fulfill a responsibility.

Skills are tightly focused abilities for changing the state of a system, which can be mechnical or organizational.

Skills and competencies can be required or ancillary. Required skills and competencies map directly through the responsibilities to enable outcomes. Ancillary, or supporting skills and competencies are nice but not necessary, which can help position a candidate strategically to support company (and personal) growth.

Adapt to local conditions

This is a lot of material!

The template given here is comprehensive and will adapt really well to HR software such as 15Five, Lattice, and others. Howver, local conditions may require different elements, element names, or structure. That’s fine, it’s not a bingo card, not every element needs filling out in every case. Situation dictates, and there is no substiture for common sense.

Summary

While this seems like a lot of work, after it’s done once, it gets much, much easier. Having a roadmap and an OKR system in place can help with defining Outcomes. Responsibilities can be drawn from the week to week output of people in similar positions. Competencies and Skills are a great way to target gaps in current staffing.

tl;dr ensure you have at least a notional roadmap, determine from the roadmap what needs to get done, then fill in the template.