As the founder of an executive search business, I read my fair share of job descriptions every week. Over the years, as the skill set in the automotive industry has grown and diversified, job descriptions have changed dramatically, and I’m increasingly seeing a difference between the initial job description and the eventual role the successful candidate takes on.
So I’m going to pose a controversial question: is 2024 the year we throw away the job description and start to get real?
It’s time to be really clear about what it is you want the person to do, how you want them to do it, and how you are going to measure them in terms of a role. Then simply list five or six key skills and the experience required to validate the skills. Once that is established, decide whether you can retrain existing employees, or whether you need go into the market to find your candidate.
Business will still need to hire for the legacy skills, for roles that will not change within the business, but also there may be new ways of performing these roles that require new skills. There will also be a number of hybrid roles, where there is a mixture of the old and the new, and some that are completely new.
So instead of a job description, the business lists the skills it needs to reach its goals and then finds the people with those skills. Then the team is built around what you actually need people to do, matching with the overall company strategy.
The recruitment process could be much clearer this way. One of the challenges in the current market is that new job titles and descriptions are emerging as the industry evolves. With so many similar roles in business hiding behind a myriad of different job titles, it’s just as confusing for those looking for a new role to know if they fit the bill.
Job portals can be problematic here because they can confuse candidates, they’re quite a clinical approach to recruiting and they are largely based around keyword searches. If you're creating new roles in your organisation that are something new and innovative, then you’re likely to be bombarded by irrelevant applications because of this. Think about the word “digital”, for example. It is being used in almost every industry now, in a wide variety of roles. A digital design engineer and a lecturer in digital marketing are two vastly different roles using the same keyword.
Maybe we aren’t making the job description completely obsolete, but instead focusing on a short specification that clearly articulates the objectives for the new hire. It comes down to something quite simple, short and focused. Easy enough in theory, but in the words of French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Lynda Ennis is the founder of global automotive and mobility executive search company Ennis & Co
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