Clarity is one of the best ways you can support your team. A strong job description will attract the right people to your company and give them the clarity they need to excel.
Clarity: that's one of the best ways you can support your team. A strong job description will ensure that you attract the right people to your company and provide them the clarity they need to excel in their role. Here are our tips to write a great one.
A job description should open with the big picture. At risk3sixty, we do that by naming the different categories of a person's role, which all connect back to the company's vision:
Understand, support, and communicate the firm's vision and core values as articulated in the firm Management Operating System (MOS).
So, for a practice leader (think: director or manager), they have responsibilities in the areas of cultivating vision, culture, driving positive economics, developing leaders, and so on—all geared toward understanding, supporting, and communicating the firm's vision and core values as articulated in the firm MOS.
From the overview, we shift to role-specific responsibilities. This looks like clarity around how each of those responsibilities should play out in a given role, along with KPIs (key performance indicators) which will measure their success. Here's an example of how one of our practice leaders might be directed to cultivate culture in their leadership role:
There's a description of how their responsibility will play out, notes about the support they'll receive, and—this is crucial—information about how their performance will be measured. For a Culture responsibility, the practice leader will be successful if they retain around 90 percent of their team.
An Economics related goal will have even more specific KPI measurements:
After detailing the role-specific responsibilities, a job description should then relay any company-wide relevant information.
By the way—AI can help you with this so you are not reinventing the wheel. Often, you'll get a helpful baseline that you can then edit and massage as needed.
In short: a good job description should provide an overview of the company's vision and core values, a list of role-specific responsibilities, a breakdown of each responsibility, and key performance indicators that will measure progress in each area.
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