What is a job description? Meaning and definition
Job description: what is meant by this term? Hundreds of junior recruiters or HR specialists at the beginning of their professional experience have asked the same question, and also wondered: what makes an effective job description?
The job description is an important part of the recruiting process. As a recruiter it is important to be able to effectively describe the elements that characterise a vacant position.
Also because in the world of recruitment there’s a secret that the most prepared professionals are keeping to themselves:
INEFFECTIVE JOB DESCRIPTION = FEW CANDIDATES
The goal of this post is to help all those HR professionals who have recently entered the role or those Master HR students interested in deepening their understanding of terms such as job description, job posting, job analysis, job board etc.
What is a job description?
Job description: list of all the responsibilities, requirements and qualifications required for a specific vacancy. Typically job descriptions are processed by the recruiter in collaboration with the line manager (or the recruiter of an external recruiting company).
A job description is the basis of any form of job posting (publishing a job ad on a job board or portal) and aims to present a clear image to the candidates so that they can decide whether they may want to submit their application.
But it’s not only this. A job description also has a weight in the subsequent phases of the recruiting process [LUCY: college con il aricolo sul I fasi di recruiting] and is a practical tool for the job interview to evaluate the match between the candidate and the ideal person that the line manager has in mind.
Of course to effectively write a job title it’s important to have a clear vision of the sought after role. To do this job analysis is crucial: the process of gathering information about a role. The goal of job analysis is to identify and describe the tasks, the training and the skills needed to fulfill a certain role. An effective job analysis is able to improve the main metrics of the recruitment process, namely time to hire and quality to hire.
In this sense we can say that:
APPROPRIATE JOB ANALYSIS = EFFECTIVE JOB DESCRIPTION
At Inrecruiting we believe it is important that a recruiter (especially those who are junior) is guided in the process of creating a job description.
For this reason, in the new release of our recruitment software (January 2017) we integrated a wizard for creating job ads divided into sections: so the recruiter has a step-by-step guided process that takes them through writing the job description, publishing the ad (this can be done on more than 30 Job boards in just one click with the Multiposting feature integrated into Inrecruiting.)