How to Manage Job Descriptions

Tip 1: Understand the Benefits of Job Descriptions

Many people consider developing a job description only when they're hiring for a new role. It's virtually impossible to recruit, interview, and hire the right candidate without one. However, job description management serves several other important purposes, including communicating your expectations and letting employees know what it takes to excel in their jobs.

Employers can review the job requirements to narrow the applicant search before the interviewing process even begins and excerpt a summary of the job description for marketing the job posting. A thorough job description can also deter unqualified candidates from applying and quickly eliminate others during early consideration.

Job description development offers an opportunity to examine your team and your company as a whole and consider what you will need to succeed. Where are you now? Where would you like to be in the future? And what kinds of skills and abilities will your people need to help your company get from here to there? Carefully building job descriptions helps create a roadmap for future growth.

Done properly, job descriptions management can:

• Enhance communication between you and your employees
• Set the stage to fairly and legally discipline or terminate employees who don't meet your expectations
• Improve your ability to retain stellar employees
• Help you plan for the future
• Measure future performance
• Improve employee morale

Tip 2: Understand How Job Description Management Can Help Facilitate Pay Equity

Thorough job descriptions help facilitate accurate pay equity analysis. The foundation for pay equity is equal pay for comparable work. Establishing and documenting comparable work upfront with job descriptions is the only way to ensure your pay equity analysis is accurate and complies with legal and state laws. Documentation and assigning skills, licenses, compensation, job family, job department, and job level for each job description helps organizations define comparable work – a critical component for conducting accurate pay equity analysis.

Job descriptions can also help legally protect organizations, as they can serve to defend the reasoning behind why a position is exempt or non-exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). By outlining a job's requirements and defining performance standards, the job description will help to justify your employment decisions and reduce your organization's exposure to costly litigation.

Tip 3: Standardize the Job Description Management Process

Audit your existing company roles and job descriptions. Then, develop job description templates that define standard or required language, including assigning skills, license requirements, compensation, job family, job department, and job level. Documenting comprehensive job description information will be critical later when conducting pay equity analysis.

You will also need to define a standard job description review and approval process that is used across the company. Look for a software program to simplify and standardize your internal workflow.

Tip 4: Develop a job description content library

When you begin the process of managing your job descriptions, an important first step is determining who owns job description management at your organization. By assigning an owner (which we'll call a job description manager in this post) you communicate that job descriptions are a critical component of your business operations.

Another important step in the job description management process: centralizing your job descriptions. Managing all of your job descriptions through one command center allows for easy creation, editing, approval, and collaboration. With an online content library, coworkers can share input and concerns about new job descriptions and pull content from existing job descriptions, creating consistency across roles.

Tips 5: Make a Job Description Template

Professional job description templates provide a formal approach to describing job titles, career paths, and pay rates in a standardized and equitable manner. Job descriptions made visible to employees can offer them incentive for career progression and help reduce turnover. Being transparent helps employees understand how managers assess their performance and what they need to do to progress in their careers. We all do better when we know what's expected of us and what it takes to get to the next level.

To create a job description template you need to define which fields are required, including the job's responsibilities, competencies, qualifications, certifications.

When using a job description management solution, you can easily:

• Edit, adjust and update your organization's job description templates. Create your default export template for future standardization.
• View an export preview of your job description as you are editing with your company's logo, branding, and markup.
• Print your job description templates (as PDF or Word) and share them with key stakeholders to learn how you can improve your employees' experience.

Below for reference is a sample job description template for a technical writer.

Technical Writer

Mission, Vision & Values

Make a positive difference in people's lives by helping to advance their health, wealth and careers.

We expect all employees to adhere to our shared values of Integrity, Respect, Diversity and Inclusiveness, Collaboration, Excellence and Achievement, Stewardship, and Accountability.

Vision, Mission & Shared Values can be found here: www.salary.com

General Responsibilities

Creates and publishes technical documentations and manuals.  Develops, writes and edits complex technical files, including reports, proposals, briefs, tutorials, end-user documentation and instruction files. Collects and interprets technical data or information and coordinates layout for publication. Translates technical information and data into user-friendly manuals or document.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

1. Researches,  writes, and edits complex technical publications and proposals.
2. Gathers information about product s or clients’ needs, objectives, functions, features, and requirements.
3. Interacts with engineering and product management to verify and interpret technical information and data.
4. Has basic knowledge of media, publications or information technology system and software if needed.
5. Examples might include code documentation, technical guides, API documentation, example code, landing pages, and interface messaging.
6. Review and provide feedback on pull requests that involve documentation, blog posts, etc, to ensure language is concise, clear, and technically correct.
7. Be responsible for ensuring the greater team updates readmes, docs, tutorials and comments whenever public-facing APIs or other offerings change.

Minimum Requirements

Bachelor's degree.

Requires 2+ years of related experience in technical writing.

Requires expertise in specific area like IT, Engineering or Manufacturing, etc.

Requires skills of communicating complex technical information internally and externally.

Have a technical background and demonstrated fluency in technical concepts.

Have strong written and verbal communication skills in both community-facing and internal settings.

Enjoy taking initiative to solve open-ended problems.

Licenses / Certifications / Registrations

None required.

Budget Responsibilities

No fiscal responsibility.

Knowledge / Skills / Abilities

• Technical Writing
• Editing
• Writing Procedures & Documentation
• Proofreading
• Product Specifications
• Document Creation Software
• Business Writing
• Marketing Communications

Environmental Exposure

No adverse environmental conditions expected.

Disclaimer

Please Note: The duties and responsibilities described are not a comprehensive list and additional tasks may be assigned to the employee as necessitated by business demands. This job description does not constitute a contract of employment or otherwise limit employment-at-will rights at any time.

Tip 6: Compare and track Job Description History

When your technical writer job description is completed, you need to decide which version of your technical writer job description will be the most effective for your business.

The job description manager can inspect and decipher why job traits were edited between current and prior versions of the job description, tracking the job description management status from "in progress" to "approved" giving a complete picture of a company's review process.

When it comes to frequency, we recommend reviewing your job descriptions every six months. That doesn't mean every job description needs to be completely updated, but you should have a cadence for reviewing job descriptions to see where requirements are changing and determine if those changes are temporary or are going to fundamentally change the job description for that role.

• Compare versioning of your job descriptions to track changes and make timely edits. Compare one or multiple roles to maximize the job writing process and create consistency across jobs.
• Drill into your job's taxonomy and determine if you need to edit your descriptions so they could fit into your internal job taxonomy or if you need to add new jobs into the mix.
• Visuals, like charts, can provide an at-a-glance view to track job descriptions quickly. You can filter jobs based on the status (Not started, In Progress, In Review, and Approved) to uncover bottlenecks within the creation and review process.

Tip 7: Streamline Collaboration with Key Stakeholders

When it comes to developing job description workflows, the job description manager should send a job description through a predefined group of reviewers, such as a specific department or HR group. Using job description management software allows you to create and edit workflows to streamline the editing and approval process.

With job description management software you can example:

Build formal workflows where speci¬fic job descriptions are assigned to pre-approved reviewers, or you can build informal workflows for on-the-fly job description reviews.

Get in-process alerts on job description status, and email notifications. The job description manager can get right to where they need to be to complete the next step and see which job descriptions are out-of-date or have not been reviewed recently.

Involve relevant stakeholders to send job descriptions for review to hiring managers and colleagues using pre-defined workflows or on a one-off basis.

Maintain a list of previously approved job descriptions for audience purposes.

Get feedback, export, and share job descriptions in your company's format. Allow access to approved job descriptions for the appropriate individuals in your company.

Set up a job description dashboard chart to allow efficient communication with management.

How Job Description Software Can Help

Integrating job descriptions with your market pricing is a critical component of job description management particularly in today's tight labor market where remote and hybrid work models are upending traditional approaches to compensation. Certain job description software tools allow you to easily market price your jobs, while simplifying and standardizing your internal workflow.

Salary.com's Job Architect helps HR and compensation professionals standardize job architecture, a process that is foundational to company performance, transparency, and employee engagement. Job Architect provides, in essence, a central command center for managing job descriptions and automating the process of market pricing jobs. This comprehensive solution streamlines workflows allowing for efficient review and approval cycles. Additionally, it enables collaboration among key company stakeholders from management to hiring managers, talent acquisition, and recruiters, all of whom have roles in achieving job architecture accuracy.

It also simplifies the creation, collaboration, and approval process of job description management to help ensure that the best individuals with the right background and skill-sets are matched to the appropriate roles within the organization. Finally, JobArchitect helps companies accurately communicate a job's required skills to hire right and perform better.