Download the Job Description Checklist at the bottom of this post!
Looking to hire? Writing a job description is more than just making a list of tasks and responsibilities that come with the job. What is life like in your company? Why would someone want to work for you? What is the added value that you can offer them? Which impact can a person have in your company when taking on the job? You can save a lot of time getting it right from the start. Therefore, we like to share with you our 3 simple steps to follow when you’re planning to add a new job description to your website.
1. Spice up Your Career Page
Your company probably has a website explaining your offering to clients. However, what does your website say about you, the employer? Do you have a dedicated space on your website where you talk about team members and their expertise? Have you mentioned your company’s mission, value and culture?
People love working for a company where they can identify themselves with its mission, culture and values. So make sure you have a dedicated space on your website where you explain why the company was founded, and what it’s like to work for the company. Explain why someone would want to work for you.
The best place to talk about these topics is a page dedicated to the team, typically titled as “Team”, “Careers”, “About us” or “Working at X”. The big difference between this page and a webpage focused on your service offering is that you can take the time (and paragraphs) to describe what it’s like to work for your company. Add some pictures of the team and don’t forget to mention the perks you offer to your employees. And yes, even great coffee is a good reason!
You can also add a recruitment funnel that points out the different steps a candidate will follow during the recruitment process. You’ll find a good example on the careers page of Hotjar: https://careers.hotjar.com/
Pro tip: Add testimonials! Did someone just end his/her internship at your company? Ask them to describe how they’ve experienced working for you! You can do the same with freelancers and regular employees. Just like client testimonials, employee testimonials add credibility to your business.
Topics to add on your career page:
1. Mission statement
2. Company values & culture
3. Perks
4. Vacancies
5. Recruitment funnel
2. Define Your Persona
A persona, or buyer persona, is frequently used by Marketing teams to define the profile of the perfect customer for the business. This helps the team to define a tone of voice, a message the client can relate to, the right media channels, etc. We can easily apply this approach to HR too, as we also want to reach a very specific kind of profile. When you look for a developer, you might probably want to use a different message and target other types of channels compared to the search for your next CFO, right?
Hubspot has created a very useful tool to create personas: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona
Once you’ve created a persona for the vacancy, validate your results with someone that has the profile you’re looking for. Ask them questions like: “Can you identify yourself with this profile?”, “What would you change or add?”, etc.
Pro tip: Once you’ve created your job description, don’t forget to check with that same person if they would be interested in the job. If not, you know you’re not quite there yet!
3. Now You Can Start Writing the Job Description
With the right persona for the job in mind, it should be easy to set up a job description that appeals to the profile.
Use this checklist to make sure your job description is ready to be published