Job descriptions people actually use

The problem it solves

Most job descriptions in a company were written for a reader who no longer exists: the candidate. They were drafted in the language of an advertisement, to fill a vacancy, and filed on the day someone accepted the offer. Nobody has opened them since, except to copy the structure when the next opening had to be posted.

The document resurfaces in one particular kind of moment: when two people are arguing about whose job something was, when someone asks for a pay adjustment and there is nothing to compare it against, when a supervisor cannot say which decisions their people are allowed to make without checking first. That is when it becomes clear the description is a list of agreeable verbs, coordinate, support, follow up, that never states what result is expected or where this role ends and the next one begins.

What falls between two areas does not fall all the way. Someone picks it up, usually the same person, and within months it has become part of their job without appearing anywhere, without counting in their review and without anyone else knowing how to cover it. The company accumulates inherited requirements nobody can explain, evaluates against expectations it never wrote down, and hires for roles that exist in full only in the head of whoever supervises them.

What it covers

This workshop treats the job description as a management instrument rather than a recruiting document. A role is written well when it answers three questions a task list never answers: what results are expected of this position, which decisions it can make without consulting anyone, and where its responsibility ends and someone else's begins. Everything else, format included, follows from those three.

Most of the time is spent on the participants' own material. Each person brings a real role from their organization, ideally a contested one, and rewrites it during the session on a worksheet that forces them to begin with results. The first exercise tends to be revealing precisely because it is hard: turning follow up on orders into a verifiable result requires deciding what a well-handled order means in this company, and that decision had almost never been made.

The boundary block is done in pairs and small groups. Participants cross-read the descriptions of roles that touch each other and locate the grey zones: what each believes the other does, what nobody claims, and what two people are quietly doing twice. The same block audits requirements one by one, separating what can actually be verified from what was inherited because the previous postholder happened to have it, and connects the description to review and pay structures without turning the session into a compensation exercise.

The closing section is about maintenance, which is where most description systems fail: when a role is revisited, who signs the update and what kind of change in the work forces it to be reopened. The hardest case is worked last, which is writing a role nobody in the organization has held yet, where there is no experience to draw on and no shortage of expectations.

What participants learn

• Design job descriptions from expected results and the decisions a role owns rather than from task lists.
• Identify the boundaries between roles, including the grey zone two areas share without ever having agreed on it.
• Evaluate a role's requirements and drop the ones carried over out of habit or from the previous postholder's profile.
• Apply a review standard that keeps a description current as the work changes.
• Develop the description of a role that does not yet exist in the organization.

Agenda

1. 01Expected results instead of task lists
2. 02Decisions the role can make without asking
3. 03Boundaries between roles, and the shared ground in between
4. 04Requirements that can be verified versus requirements kept out of habit
5. 05How the description connects to evaluation and pay
6. 06Updating: when a description is revisited and who signs it
7. 07New roles: writing a job nobody here has done yet

What the organisation leaves with

• One job description rewritten during the session, built from results and ready for internal review.
• A one-page format with the sections this company will use across every role.
• A boundary map for the roles in one area, with the shared ground marked and assigned.
• A review calendar for descriptions, naming who signs each update.