Photo by Keren Levand on Unsplash
Of course, you know that if you have a successful human resources program, you’ll maximize your opportunities for business profits.
With talented and conscientious employees, you’ll be better able to control costs, achieve quality service and/or products, maintain positive communication, and attain high performance.
In turn, your customers will appreciate a positive buying environment at your company.
To successfully compete against other employers for the best talent, many companies have found it necessary to update their job descriptions.
Here’s how they fine-tune their approach in recruiting today’s job seekers:
In-depth conversations with your affected managers and employees
By collaborating with them, you’ll be getting the most accurate information about job responsibilities, and will enhance team morale by giving your team members the satisfaction of being involved.
Develop checklists and questionnaires to ascertain the needed talents, education, and mental and physical abilities.
List qualifications
After you communicate with your team members, specifically list the necessary skills, essential experience levels, as well as any necessary degrees and licenses.
Be careful: To guard against possible legal challenges from minority applicants, avoid listing any “nice-to-have” attributes that might be deemed discriminatory.
Accurately list the ideal title and purpose
Once you have enough information about the position, make your title and purpose simple-to-understand but compendious.
In other words, you want job descriptions to be accurate and easy for applicants so they quickly relate to your posting sans any technical jargon.
Be sure to explain how the position fits in the overall objectives of your company.
Describe your workplace culture and setting
Explain which company equipment that will need to be used and the overall work environment. That includes the indoor or outdoor temperatures in the working conditions.
Mention how the successful applicant must be able to interact with coworkers and/or customers.
Outline the essential duties
List the salient duties first before listing the least important duties. Keeping in mind the regulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ada.gov), delineate the differences between essential and nonessential responsibilities.
Provide a picture of essential duties:
- Demands of the position such as required physicality, and types of responsibilities including communication skills.
- Frequency and time spent on duties.
- Scheduling details including shift hours.
- Mention whether other employees will perform the duties and/or whether the job will be shared.
- Indicate whether there are supervisorial duties and to whom the person will report.
In your verbiage, use action verbs and present tense. Where feasible, assess required functions as in daily, weekly and monthly timelines.
Specify your performance expectations
For each job function, spotlight your qualitative and quantitative expectations for performance.
Not only will an employee be likely to deliver desired results, this is a necessary HR precaution for you to prepare documentation in future assessments of your employee’s performance.
Determine exempt vs. nonexempt status
Beware: Exempt status should not be determined by the job title. To avoid issues regarding minimum wage and overtime pay, be certain you categorize the job correctly.
Finally, before you determine exempt status for any position, know the regulations of the U.S. Department of Labor (dol.gov/regulations).
From the Coach’s Corner, here are additional sources of information:
Write Better Job Descriptions to Attract Best Talent – 16 Tips — To inspire the best applicants to apply at your company, there are at least 16 strategies to incorporate in your job descriptions.
With Low Unemployment, HR Should Fix Hiring Processes — Employers complain they can’t get employees to fill job openings for valid reasons. To a large extent that’s true. But in this strong economy, Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli maintains human resources departments aren’t using best practices in hiring.
In Tight Job Market, How to Market Your Company to Applicants – With the low unemployment rate but with eleven-million unfilled jobs in America, this is a tight market for attracting talented employees. So, if you need to fill a position, the last thing you want is to be turned down by an applicant who appears to be a perfect fit for your culture.
How to Increase Conversion Rates of Online Job Applicants — Your business is not alone when it comes to the high costs incurred in the recruitment of job applicants online. Most job seekers get frustrated and quit in the middle of their online applications.
10 Talent-Recruitment Strategies that Lead to Business Profit – By developing strategic recruiting plans, human resources professionals will make significant contributions to the bottom-line profit goals of their employers. So, it’s imperative to innovate in your recruiting processes and market your strategies to senior management and hiring managers.
“If you provide enough value, then you earn the right to promote your company in order to recruit new customers. The key is to always provide value.”
-Guy Kawasaki
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