Compiling the job specification
When someone resigns it should be seen as an opportunity to redefine the job and the type of person you need in it. Usually it fills most managers with dread – another problem they have to deal with on top of everything else. Don’t panic. You will have enough information readily to hand to make a start on the recruiting and you may even have an old job specification you can use as a starting point.
What to do first
Understanding what you are looking for will help you find it. Some time spent now in these early stages will save time and money in the long run and will help you hire the best. Whether you are recruiting a new person into an existing role or for an entirely new role to the business, you need to identify what that role is.
The job specification or job definition is the document that outlines who the job reports to, the main function / overall objective of the role, details the specific duties and responsibilities that will be included in the job, and the remuneration package.
Recruiting a new candidate into an existing role
Even though this role already exists and you may have a job specification for it, spend a few moments reviewing it and ask yourself the following questions:
How has your business changed since you hired the person who has just resigned?
How has the role changed?
Have they changed it? Some employees adapt roles and end up spending the majority of their time on the parts they enjoy most and vice versa.
Perhaps you didn’t hire the present incumbent and you have always felt that there could be someone more suitable for the job or with a different skill set. What other or different skills do you want now?
If the outgoing employee has done a good job, then get them involved in helping you select the next candidate and take the pressure off you. Can they suggest an area where they felt they struggled and advise that you need to look for different experience in someone new?
Do they actually need to be replaced?
Could some of their tasks be better assigned elsewhere?
Can you afford not to replace or hire this person? Saving money is always important no matter what the current economic situation, and the cost of hiring is expensive on top of the annual salary and employment costs. You also need to think about the bigger picture and the impact that not having someone in this role may make on the rest of the team, your customers, etc. One may outweigh the other.
How vital is this role within the overall business and within the team?
Does this role report to the correct line manager? As your business has changed and the role has developed, it may be better placed in another function.
Consider the secretary hired as a vital part of the business working for two partners in recruitment several years ago. As technology improved, the partners found it easier to amend CVs on-screen rather than having her re-type them. There were no confirmation of interview letters needed as this was all done on email. The major part of the role had disappeared. The secretary concerned was still busy but now much more involved in office and facilities management. When she resigned it needed careful consideration regarding what the job now involved and what skills were needed to fill it. Office management was now the main function of the job and secretarial skills were not even needed.
So what is the job?
Somewhere on your system you may have the old job specification. However, it may be one that was written before you joined or just completely out-of-date. Take a look at it and decide if it is still valid but what changes are needed, if any. By preparing now and ensuring you know what the job is and what kind of person you need to fill it you will be able to more closely match candidates to your current requirements.
If you do not review and update the details, candidates will be selected on out-of-date information. They may meet the old criteria but you will realise during the interviews that your needs have changed and you need candidates with different skills. This will mean going back to the start, having wasted valuable time and costs.
If the job specification is no longer appropriate or you don’t have one, then write one. It will help you focus on what you need, and you can then use it as the base for briefing recruiters, advertising and so on, and to match the candidates’ skills to during the recruitment process.
Spend time with the person who is leaving, especially if they have been excelling in this role. Ask them to write down their typical daily / weekly / monthly / annual routines.
When you go through this list with them you may well find that there are some things that you didn’t even know they did and some things you assumed they did but they don’t! It can be quite an eye opener.
Ask them to allocate the percentage of their time spent doing each task. This will not only help you plan your recruiting but will enable you to ensure the job is covered properly before the new person joins.
Analyse what they have said and decide if that is how you want the role to continue. You can use this for the basis of your job specification, adding any other additional duties and responsibilities.
Recruiting for a new vacancy
Of course this could be a new vacancy because your company is expanding, an exciting time for someone to join. Time spent considering the role at this stage will pay off and it will help you focus on what is really needed, how this person will fit in with the rest of the team as well as what their specific duties will involve. It will also ensure that there is no conflict with other staff and that this role does not cross over what they are doing.
If it’s a new role you will need to start afresh. Don’t try and amend an old job spec for a totally new role, as this will become too confusing.
- Start by looking at the reasons it has been decided to add to the team.
- Decide on what is the overall objective of the role.
- If possible discuss it with the team and anyone else this role will impact on or interface with. It will help you decide on the specific tasks, and the team will feel included; you want them to feel that this person will be an asset, not a threat.
- List the tasks (this does not need to include how internal procedures work as they will be apparent once in the business).
- Put the tasks in priority order with the one that is the most important first.
All of this need not take very much time but preparation at this stage will pay dividends. It will save you from hiring the wrong person and having to spend time re-recruiting.
Writing the job specification
In large companies the Human Resources team will usually write the job specifications in conjunction with the line manager, so you may be involved in this part of the process or in smaller companies you may need to write one yourself.
More detailed job specifications can include a breakdown of percentage of time spent in each task and how success will be measured.
It is important to compile these as accurately as possible. An employee can refuse to carry out a task you ask them to do, and you cannot discipline anyone for failing to do something, or underperforming, if the task is not included in the job specification.
Job specification format
Your company may already have a job specification format, but if not it is worth drawing up one of your own. It need not be complicated but it will be a useful tool throughout the recruitment process and afterwards. It can also form the basis of an assessment once the candidate is hired.
The job specification should be written so that it can be understood both internally and externally, as it is good practice to advertise the role internally, if appropriate, and to share it with the external candidates.
Do not use company jargon, job titles, process names or anything else that will not be understood by the candidates. A term you use every day with significant meaning in your company, but one that is company-specific, will mean nothing to external candidates. ‘Drive to ship’, which in one company refers to getting the product to market, will be totally misleading to external candidates.
The job spec can include some or all of the following:
- some brief information about your company
- how the role fits in with the organisation (include an organisation chart if possible)
- the structure of the company
- the structure of the team (if appropriate)
- who the role reports to
- any direct reports
- main function or overall objective of the job
- duties and responsibilities, i.e. the tasks involved and how often, i.e. daily, monthly, annually. Start with the main part of the job first to ensure you have the right emphasis
- a ‘cover all’ such as ‘any other tasks as required by the business’
- measurement of success – by including this in each of the main tasks it will help the candidates understand what they are striving for
- hours of the job / operational times. If you are not giving specific hours then hours the company is open will be useful. Full details will be in the offer letter and contract
- remuneration, i.e. salary and benefits (if appropriate – in some companies these will all be negotiable)
- the candidate specification (see Chapter 2)
- how success in the role will be measured.
Be careful not to include any wording that could be discriminatory. The job specification should not refer to the job holder as ‘he’ or ‘she’, and therefore needs to be written neutrally.
Do not include anything that could imply it can only be done by one sex, such as manual jobs only being done by men.
Use the job spec to brief your recruiters and the candidates, write advertisements, assess CVs and interviewed candidates and circulate internally if appropriate.
Every company’s job specification format will be different and there are no right or wrong ways to present it, but the main areas that must be included are detailed below.
Who does this role report to?
It is important to ask:
Is the role reporting to the right line manager?
As companies develop it sometimes makes sense to re-assign the reporting line to a more appropriate manager. Discuss this with them and then ensure that they are involved and agree the job specification.
The main function / overall objective
Decide on what the ‘overall’ or ‘main’ function of the job is. It should be brief, to the point, and should convey the essence of the role. The specifics of the role will all be related to this.
For a Facilities Manager this could be: to ensure the smooth and efficient running of the company’s facilities.
For a building site manager: to ensure the safe, timely and cost-effective construction / refurbishment of the company’s contracts.
Duties and responsibilities
These are the tasks that the job holder is expected to carry out and should include daily, weekly, monthly and annual tasks as well as any that have to be carried out more sporadically.
To compile these, if you have them, you can use the existing job specification updated and amended accordingly or the list of duties the employee who is leaving has compiled that you have reviewed, added to and amended where necessary.
If you are compiling a new job specification, start with what will be the most important or most time-consuming task and work through to the smaller parts. Remember to include all regular tasks, not just daily ones, and any that are more sporadic, for example being responsible for organising fire drills.
Include a last point on the list of tasks / duties such as ‘anything else as deemed necessary within the business’.
There may be other situations taking place in your organisation, so once you have your schedule of duties consider the following questions before finalising your job spec:
What else do I need to include?
You may be aware of situations such as re-structuring or outsourcing, etc., which mean that this job must change or have additional or different duties included. Ideally you will let candidates see the finished job spec so ensure these points are included, unless they are still confidential.
If the role reports directly to you, is there anything else you need specifically included?
It is difficult to ask employees to take on extra work once they have joined the business, so this is the time to change or expand the job role. Are there any tasks currently covered by other staff that should be included in this role?
Part of your role when you joined the company was ordering and negotiating on the company stationery. Despite several promotions, this task has followed you. Why not make it part of the remit for the new person?
No-one likes to make redundancies but it is even more difficult when it is someone only recently hired. If the role had been reviewed it might have been decided not to hire in the first place. It’s also worth considering if there are any alternatives.
Could this role be amalgamated?
There may be another role within the organisation that is currently under review which may mean someone can take on all or part of this role, or there may be two or more vacancies which could be combined.
If you are going to amalgamate roles you need to consider if this will work in practice.
- Don’t try and be too clever and end up combining roles that are too diverse, as you will make it unlikely to find a candidate with experience to cover all the necessary elements.
- Don’t combine roles which will mean the candidate has two or more different direct reporting lines. Very few people can manage this situation without some kind of conflict.
- Do ensure that the experience and skills needed for any combined role are possible to find.
- Do consider that a candidate may not have to have all this experience – could they grow or be trained into part of the role?
Remuneration
You may have set salary bands within your business and each job may be already graded with a specific pay range.
If you don’t have this or you are recruiting a new vacancy you will have to set the level you want to pay. It’s worth comparing what others are paying for similar roles if this is possible. Take a look at websites, advertisements, etc. and discuss this with your recruitment consultants if you are using any.
Remember, your salary may need to tempt someone away from their present role.
Apart from basic salary, think what else you could include such as medical insurance, pension contributions, discounts and so on. There are also companies that specialise in vouchers for different perks. Most of these benefits are taxable so the monetary advantage may not be that great, but their perceived value is high.
In certain sectors it is usual to offer more than the statutory four weeks’ holiday and if you are offering less than the norm this will cause a problem. People do not like to give up five weeks’ holiday for four. Make sure you are offering what is accepted in your sector or better.
How success in the role will be measured
You may want to include on the job specification the breakdown of how much time is spent on each task so that candidates can see how their time will be structured. This will be a useful guide for your interviews as you can compare what the candidate says they spend most of their time doing with what you need. It will also help identify what are the most important elements of the job and which ones need to be measurable to indicate the new employee’s success in the role.
Try and quantify how success in this role will be measured.
A retailer is recruiting a store operations director. They have a five-year plan to open ten new stores. Part of the success in this role will be measured by achieving the roll-out plan, turnover of the stores, profitability.
Some larger companies include the use of key performance indicators (KPIs) in their candidate specification, especially if the role has performance-related pay.
KPIs are the way of measuring success for part of the role. Success in each of these is then related to annual appraisals, grading and often pay awards.
By informing the job holder at the outset how they will be evaluated, you will save disputes and confusion later on. However, if you include KPIs you must adhere to the criteria for appraisals and reviews especially if they are linked to pay awards.
There are some very complex systems for developing these, which may already be set up by your HR department. However, you can introduce simple methods of calculating success.
Salespeople will often have salary related to sales via a commission payment but in some cases they can earn bonuses on profitability, opening of new accounts, opening of new doors, i.e. where an existing customer opens new outlets, the number of cold calls that are made, how well they plan their journeys if they are a sales representative, how many customer visits they make, how well they do on repeat orders, etc. These can all be used as KPIs.
Decide what will be a successful outcome for this job holder and identify how that can be measured. In a call centre this could include the number of calls taken in a period of time, the time spent on each call, the number of calls that had to be followed up, etc.
- Take time to review why you are recruiting.
- Consider if you can amalgamate roles or parts of roles.
- Decide if the reporting line is still working.
- Amend, re-write or create a new job spec – even though you are time-short this will save time in the long run.
- Ensure you include all the duties.
- Keep your job specification jargon-free.