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How to Write a Job Description in 3 Easy Steps

Guest post by: Dianne Shaddock

Article Overview: Avoiding misunderstandings when it comes to employee expectations is one key to business success. One way of making sure that employees understand their role is having excellent job descriptions. Here are some tips for managers.

How to Write a Job Description in 3 Easy Steps

It is important to have job descriptions despite the size of your business. I can’t tell you how often I’ve worked on issues between managers and employees that centered on a lack of communication about what was expected of their employees and their role. Having a clearly written job description in place is really one of several ways that you can help avoid any confusion or misunderstandings of what is required of your employees. A job description is also a very critical tool in the process of interviewing applicants for job openings. As a hiring manager, if you’re not able to clearly convey the skills and experience that you need for your applicant to be successful during your job interview, how can your applicant really sell their experience to you when they are meeting with you? A job description allows you to best determine what type of person you’re looking for and it’s essentially your blue print for determining the potential employee’s ability to perform the task that you need accomplished. A job description also ensures that both the potential employees that you’ll be interviewing and your current employees understand the nature of their jobs. Job descriptions don’t need to contain every specific task that you’ll need an employee to perform. A well written job description really highlights the core tasks with reference to other tasks as assigned. So this is how you can write a job description in 3 easy steps: Step No. 1 Create a job title that reflects the work to be done. Give some thought to the job title. Make sure that the job title truly reflects the type of work that the person will be doing. Step No. 2 Summarize in bullet points the actual work that will be performed. Step No. 3 Write down the specific type of experience needed to perform the job effectively as well as the educational requirements and years of experience needed to perform the job if applicable. And that’s really it! Now let’s walk through a fictitious customer service representative job description which will include a description summary in bullet points. The job description title is “Customer Service Representative” and the description in this job description reads: “The customer service representative is the first point of contact for all customers and will respond to customer inquiries for more information on our products and services. The successful candidate will work with a variety of different clientele, responding to requests by phone for information, or helping to resolve customer product issues.” Required skills and experience points that I need for this job are: • A customer service representative must be able to learn the details about the variety of products and services that we are, for quickly and convey that information about the product to our customers. • A customer service representative must have a pleasant demeanor even under pressure and be able to handle difficult customers with empathy and tact. • The customer service representative must have previous experience with working in a call center, or experience with working with multiple customers and responding to questions. I have several other bullet points, but this will give you a sense of how you would think about the types of task that are involved in a job and then list them in a job description. After you’ve listed all of your bullet points, if you are requiring a certain number of years of experience or specific level of education you want to be sure to include that in the job description at the very end. The thing to remember is to keep it simple. Writing a job description need not be complicated or overly structured. Your description may really be only one paragraph long, but what is important is that it describes exactly what experience and skills are important to you for that applicant to be successful in the job that you’re hiring them for. I wish you luck in your hiring efforts.

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Article Tags: Help with job descriptions, hiring tips for managers, hiring tips for supervisors, How to write job descriptions, Management Best Practices



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