In the age of information revolution and technological advancements, every employer search for an ideal talent to meet their business goals and provisioning substantial growth to their employees. The competition to excite candidates by advertising a perfect job opportunity is really high in the market between Start-Ups, Small-Medium Enterprises, and Large Enterprises. In today’s highly competitive environment, the use of the latest technology trends is essential to meet customer’s business requirements and maintaining persistent growth in the business. Customers are really conscious about choosing the quality of services that can strengthen their brand and improve performance. They would like to spend more money with a company that has excellent customer service. To get upfront in the market, you need to keep building a knowledgeable workforce and in-parallel should have a strong recruitment strategy for hiring the best talent in the industry.

To attract ideal candidates, writing a perfect job description is essential. You can easily make an effective job description by covering these important things while writing a good job description.

1. Job Role Analysis
2. Job Title
3. Roles and Responsibilities
4. Educational Qualification
5. Knowledge
6. Hands-on Skills
7. Personality Traits
8. Compensation
9. Logistics
10. Company Information

A Job description outlines the role of a desired potential candidate. While writing a perfect job description you should take care of the following job description goals:

1. First, understand and analyze the role
2. Provide appropriate title at par to the experience, level of position, nature of responsibilities, and accomplishments from the desired role.
3. Explain the role in a simplified manner
4. Set the success metrics to measure performance, it can be both quantitative or qualitative viz. functional performance, operational performance, revenue and profits, time-based performance, client satisfaction, process improvement, teamwork, and collaboration, etc.
5. Career growth path
6. Define Remuneration and Benefits
7. Protect the company to clearly document the expectation from the desired role
8. Excite candidates with the first impression of your company and its work culture
9. Define the logistics like Location, Work timings, Reporting Manager, Start Date, and Exempt Status

Elements for Job Analysis for any specific role

With the evolution of Start-Ups, the roles are constantly changing and people are agile to perform multiple responsibilities with more ownership and accomplishments. If you are not familiar with areas like engineering, marketing, sales, and technologies in trend you may miss important facts to accurately determine a role with right responsibilities, qualifications, and conditions. You need to understand the differences in roles within departments. Like you get a requirement that “I need a Designer” without any clarification about what type of designer? Though, a User Experience Designer, User Interface Designer, and Graphic Designer are completely different roles. In order to determine the details about the required job role, you can ask relevant questions to your team like:

• What skills a candidate should have?
• What should be the qualification of a candidate?
• How much experience a candidate should have?
• What kind of projects or domain knowledge, we look for?
• What activities a new hire should perform?
• What are the key performance indicators for this role?

Define the Job Title

After having job analysis done you will now have more clarity to define an appropriate and accurate job title for the desired role. It is advisable to keep a short job title and should not be more than 4 words. Avoid using abbreviations like Sr., Jr., DBA, etc. Avoid using unclear and unconventional job titles like “Customer Service Advocate” which is actually a “Customer Support Specialist”. Using an unclear job title can create confusion about the job role. So, having the right job title really matters.

Define the Role & Responsibilities

While defining the responsibilities never attempt to copy online templates. You can go through it just for reference, however, always write it yourself as per your company’s culture and co-relate the kind of personalities your organization is looking for who perform well with-in organization and among the peer members in a team. Be precise while defining the responsibilities and clearly distinguish the essential vs. non-essential tasks and must include points given below:

• List down the routine activities or tasks you want the new hire to perform.
• Highlight the methods to be known to perform and follow.
• Mention clear objectives, targets, and expected results to achieve. It should clearly demonstrate how you measure success.
• Also, mention the phrase “You may also perform additional duties as requested”.

Define the Qualification

While defining the qualification focus on proven results and priorities required vs. optional. Try to categories it as given below:

• Education: Like B.Tech. in Computer Science, an MBA in Marketing, etc.
• Knowledge: Like understanding of computer science principles and basic fundamentals
• Hands-on Skills: Like graphics designing using Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Dreamweaver, and coding using C# /ASP.net
• Traits: Like the personality with strong enthusiasm, thoughtful leadership, active listener, excellent written and verbal communication, strong work ethics, good at solving critical problems, supporting and empathizing, etc.

Avoid writing following terms and focus on proven results:

• Avoid the use of sayings like gladiator, warrior, ninja, rock start, think outside the box, etc. These terms are overused and don’t sound realistic.
• Avoid asking for a grade point average or degree from a prestigious university. Earlier it was in trend, but now it is considered as non-traditional and non-anticipating for qualifying candidates. Many good companies have stopped using it after internal analysis.
• Avoid the use of discriminatory terms like disability, gender, age, race, religion, marriage, beliefs, etc.
• Do not consider years of experience as major criteria for qualifying a candidate, rather than focus on high performing candidates with proven results.

Look for an ideal candidate based on your known limitations with respect to compensation, benefits, facilities, comfort, office ambiance, and plan further accordingly.

Define the Compensation Package

To decide the gross compensation, you can determine it using compensation search engines like Payscale.com, Salary.com, Glassdoor, PayScale, Indeed, SalaryList, Salary Expert, etc. Particularly for analyzing it based on Start-up’s compensation, you can determine it using Advanced-HR, AngelList, and other similar kinds of online tools. They provide you free compensation data for private and venture-backed companies.  It helps you to determine the salaries offered in the market for real jobs by specific roles and locations. It is also important to consider the seniority, location, and stage of your company. Determining the Salary is quite simple, however, deciding the equity depends upon the realist factors and differs from company to company.

Salary is one of the major components for the Candidate to decide applying for a job or not. Providing clear compensation and benefits helps the employer in filtering candidates and saving time. It reflects the transparent culture of the organization and encourages candidates to apply. It helps you to increase the number of applicants when the salary details are given. It reflects a positive image of the company having standard and fair practices are adopted to reduce the pay gaps.

In case the current employee salaries are below the standard market value and you are keeping the compensation at par to the market then it might upset the current employees who are relatively getting lesser salaries than the new hire. Showing Salary details in the Job posting can also bring in the risk of getting your competitors paying higher than you, which can make negotiation difficult due to mismatch in the expected salary vs offered salary. In case you are significantly paying below the market, it can become a reason to discourage the applicants which can lead to a lesser number of applicants applying for a job. For known brands paying significantly lesser then the market can also lead to loss of market reputation.

If you can pay compensation at par or above to the market competition, it is good to show the salary details, as it helps you to attract more quality candidates. If you can pay below the market competition then, it is advisable not to show the salaries while defining the Job details. Avoid misleading the candidates by mentioning a higher salary range but in actual you are paying lesser. It will unnecessarily spoil the reputation of the company in the market through poor reviews given by the candidates via online sources. It is advisable to update the compensation based on your caliber in comparison to your competitors of a similar caliber. For having it done keep a fair and transparent promotion policy backed by a strong and disciplined culture.

The gross compensation package should include components like Salary, Equity, Commission / Incentives, Health Insurance, 401(k), Paid Time Off, Disability/life insurance, Relocation perks, Training, and any additional benefits provided for the given role.

Define Job Logistics

Job details should also contain the logistics like Work Location, Work timings, Reporting Manager, Start Date, Exempt Status, Travel Requirement, On-Site / Off-Site Job, Background Verification, necessary documentation, and any additional qualifying criteria.

Define about Company Profile

While defining the company profile make sure it is clear, concise, and uniquely describe your company’s objective, vision, culture, work style, office locations, and office ambiance. It should clearly reflect the company’s ethics and values. Your company profile should be descriptive and aspirational. It clearly defines what you do and what you want to be. Reading your company profile should excite the candidates to apply for a job.

Additional Optimization for a good Job Description

• Ask for feedback from the internal hiring team or reporting managers, it will help you not to miss out on something important to mention or excluding something which is not necessary to mention.
• For getting your job description ranked in the Google and Job Site Search Engines, you can define the necessary keywords that a Candidate will search for.  Generally, they are mentioned in job title, skills, and location.
• Encourage offering a referral bonus. It can help you to get a good number of applicants.
• Keep the relevant validity period attached to all jobs. It will help you to keep revising the jobs as per the latest market trend and ensuring candidates are applying for the real active jobs only.

We hope this information is helpful to you. For more knowledge and expert advise staying connected with us on VeriiPro.com.