Candidate Preparation

Know The Job

If you want a successful hire, a great placement, the very first step is: You got to know the job. While this sounds simple and perhaps even common sense, this is where many recruiters and HR folks fall down. When I say know the job, it starts with knowing the responsibilities but it goes beyond that. Knowing the job for a successful placement means not only knowing what the job duties, but also, the company culture, how the job fits in the organization, within the department, and so on.

Recruiters recruiting for a job that they do not really understand happens all the time. Why does this happen? Well, this happens for a host of reasons that include a hiring manager that is “too busy” to sit down with you and articulate what they are really looking for and what the job requires. Other reasons include a lack of job descriptions and postings, or really out dated ones. Sometimes, it is just the nature of the business where clients call you needing someone yesterday. Other times, it is due to the nature of staffing professionals. Staffing professionals are typically high energy, enthusiastic salespeople. They want to “get out of the gates” as fast as possible and start their search. Because in the staffing business, it is often a race for time to get the resource (especially for those rare skill sets). However, starting your search without fully understanding the job requirements is a recipe for disaster.

Time invested upfront with the hiring manager to determine what the job does will pay big dividends down the road. But where do you begin your research? A good place to begin to learn about the job is the job posting and/or job description. While these two documents are different, in that the job description simply describes what the job does and the job posting is an advertisement to hire with, I will use the terms interchangeably in this document since what I am going to say will apply to both.

Job Descriptions and Postings

As mentioned, begin with the job description. Ask your client if they have a job description and posting for your job order. Now when it comes to job related documents is important to always remember that job descriptions are a “snapshot in time”. The shelf-life of a job description really depends on how fast the job duties are changing. In some industries, job descriptions are more time sensitive than others. For example, in information technology changes are happening so fast that the shelf-life for these jobs is much shorter than those in carpentry or truck driving where the rate of change is much slower. So be mindful of this when working with job descriptions.

So when receiving your job description from your client, it is a good idea to review the job posting and description with your client, ask old the document is and determine if any of the duties have changed since the creation of the document.

What you do if your client does not have a job description? This is not uncommon, many companies do not have job descriptions. While this is unbelievable from an HR perspective, not having job descriptions is very common especially in small to medium sized companies (it’s hard to understand a company not documenting what their employees do but happy to pay them for it. This puts them in a bad position to maintain the internal equity or pay structure and similar bad position to handle work related grievances). If your client does not have job descriptions, well then create one for them or facilitate the process to create one with them. Doing this will prevent a bad hire from not understanding the job fully. In addition, helping your clients write job descriptions when working a job order will demonstrate your value add to your client.

Job Description as the Foundation of HR Functions

The job description is often known as the foundation of HR functions. The reason for this is because, before many of the HR functions you must first know what the job does. You must first know what the job does, before you know what education and experience is required to perform it’s duties. Thus you need to understand what the job does before you know how to hire for it. In this way, the job description serves as the foundation for recruitment and selection. Once you know what the job does, you can then know what the expected outcomes and results are for this particular job. For example, if you know the job duty is to “sweep floors”, then you will expect that an outcome for this duty is a “clean and immaculate floor”. Knowing the expected outcomes for a job can then serve as the foundation for performance management.

In the next post, we will discuss how to create great job descriptions and postings with as little pain as possible.

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