Having a good job description for every position in your company, and writing one for each emerging or revised position, will help you secure and retain good staff. A clear job description forms the basis of your contract of engagement with your staff, so it is important to set out all the expectations and requirements essential to the position.

If you develop a job description template identifying the key elements of describing any position in the company you will only need to revisit the template and fill in the blanks to standardise your job descriptions and maintain a database of descriptions for each position in the company.

Don’t be afraid to review job descriptions as often as necessary and generally on an annual basis. These reviews allow you to plan how people will have their positions upgraded, or changed. They can form the basis for salary renegotiations and also for succession planning.

It is important not to change the roles and requirements of a position without negotiation with the incumbent and making sure the new description is clear and concise and the conditions have been agreed. These negotiations about change and the clarity of the job description will form the basis for trust and loyalty between a company and its employees.

Job descriptions are valuable tools to enhance workplace harmony; clarify roles and responsibilities; create a platform for performance management and staff appraisal; form the basis for negotiations around salary and also to plan succession within the company, particularly when trying to retain good staff.

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A simple recipe for a good job description includes the following ingredients:

The title of the position and the department in which the position is held should go together if possible. Good titles are those that accurately reflect responsibilities and denote the area in which the person has those responsibilities. For example;

  • Machine Operator, Excavations – this is a title that tells us the person who holds the position operates machinery that is used in the field of excavation
  • Director, Operations and Planning – lets us know this person is responsible for overseeing the planning aspect related to the operations of the company – a strategic rather than operational role
  • Manager, Learning and Development – says this person manages the section involved in staff training and professional development
  • Administrative Assistant, Office of the Secretary General – a person who provides administrative support in a particular office

An overall description of the responsibilities of the role couched in terms of productivity. Information in this section relates to how the position fits within the company and how the position supports the goals of the organisation. This should be brief, no longer than 3-4 sentences.

The next section outlines the main areas of responsibility of the position. Each area needs to be described in terms of an action using verbs such as supervises, controls, liases with, negotiates, instructs, manages, organises, operates, supports and etc. Each description must have an action verb and should be listed in order of importance to the position, with the main responsibilities listed first. It is important in this section to try and catch all the known responsibilities of the position. This will give you a realistic picture of what this position holder does, how important they are to the success of the company and also at what level they need to be compensated. If you come up with a very long list you also need to check it for reality – will one person really be able to carry all these responsibilities? If one person has this number of responsibilities what level in the organisation do they fit – are they technical, operational, managerial, strategic, directorial? This will determine the amount of compensation the applicant will expect and the organisation will need to offer to secure good applicants.