Hi, my name is Candice Elliot, and I am the human resources strategist. Today we're going to be talking about the five elements of an exceptional job description. A lot of business owners, when I talk to them about hiring, one of the first questions that I ask is, "Can I see the job description?" A lot of times there is no job description, and so we start there. What is a job description? It explains exactly what an employee is expected to do in their job. The reason it's good to have a job description is so that both you and the employee have a solid understanding of what they're supposed to do.
That way, if for some reason the employee is having some job creep and they're getting into areas where they're not necessarily meant to be, or if you're expecting them to be doing things that are not on their job description, then you can revise and adjust or redirect as is necessary as time goes on. The first part of a job description is a company explanation, a summary of what the company does. It's good to have just a really broad but comprehensive description of what the company is, your types of products, the industry that you're in, maybe some fun facts about the company and why you're doing what you do.
The next part is the job summary. This is different from a list of qualifications or a list of job requirements, which are also a part of this. The job description or job summary really describes how this job fits into the overall organization, the purpose [00:02:00] behind the job, why you've decided to create it, the important, measurable outcomes of the job. It's in a paragraph form, not a list form. In a paragraph form. It also often talks about who the employee reports to, who reports to the employee and those kinds of things. The third element of an exceptional job description is the list of job duties.
You can be as broad with this list, or as specific with this list as makes you and your employee most comfortable as, or as what fits in best for your business. It's good to start out with broader categories of job responsibilities and then to list under those categories details that you want the candidates or the employee to understand about their job. Typically, you would choose up to four larger categories, and then you could have up to six things within those bigger buckets that you're providing direction around or providing definition around. The next section is usually qualifications.
If someone needs to have a certain number of years of experience or needs to have, say, managed a budget of a certain amount of dollars or needs a certain educational qualification or a certification, or needs to have certain physical requirements met, all of those go under the job qualifications category. Then the very last thing that you want to include in a job description is a signature line where the employee can read the job description and [00:04:00] then they're signing saying that they have read and believed that they can fulfil all of the responsibilities in the job description. They sign their name and they put the date.
Those are the five major categories of a job description. If you need any extra guidance or details on creating a job description, I'm going to have some documents available for you in the next section of this tutorial. I hope that helps as you're creating your job descriptions. I'll see you later.
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