How to Write Great Job Descriptions
Your company needs new talent; your immediate network doesn’t cut it anymore. You realise you need to go out and find someone amazing to hire. You don’t seem to have the budget or manpower for it. Where do you start?
As a business begins to grow, the process of recruiting the best talent to take it to the next level becomes increasingly challenging and important.
In this series, we break down the ideal processes for running an efficient and successful recruitment drive, based on what’s worked for businesses like yours. We’ll also cover the different building blocks we use in running the recruitment drive at Venture for Africa.
Venture for Africa is a 3-month fellowship program designed to immerse top global talent in the African startup ecosystem. We partner with Africa’s fastest-growing startups and venture builders to co-design an experience that enables fellows to quickly gain relevant skills and in-market knowledge, complete real project work and get fast-tracked to apply for a full-time role in their field.
This is the first in a 4-part series where we cover the following:
- Job descriptions & resume/application reviews (this article)
- Phone interviews and skills assessment tests
- Communication pipelines & applicant feedback
- Dashboards and reporting
Creating Job Descriptions
Who do you need to hire and why?
Asking yourself this question forces you to clearly define the responsibilities which require support from new team members.
We generally recommend that our partners follow the philosophy of ‘hiring when it hurts’. Wailin Wong put it best on the ReWork podcast when she said that companies should think about “hiring when they feel overworked for a sustained period of time or feel like the quality of their work is sliding.”
Those areas where your team is feeling the most “pain” or is lacking in particular skill sets, will become the basis of the job description (JD) for your next role.
There are a lot of creative ways to package a job description. Whatever you decide to go with, make sure to answer the following questions as plainly as possible:
- What are the key responsibilities and tasks that need to be done once the person gets onboarded?
- What is the minimum/ideal experience required for this person to be successful in the role?
- What is the profile of the person you believe would fit best into the role and the rest of the team?
- What are the benefits and salary expectations?
- What are the personal benefits and growth opportunities the ideal candidate would receive from working with your company?
- How can candidates apply?
If you’re looking for inspiration on creating a JD for a specific kind of role, you can check out Workable. It is one of the world’s leading hiring platforms and provides an amazing amount of recruiting resources for free.
Posting the job description/attracting candidates
Once your job description is ready to go, your next challenge is getting qualified candidates to apply.
If you followed the steps above correctly, you should already have a better understanding of the kind of candidate profiles you are looking for. You can use this information to locate and target the best possible pools of talent.
Examples of where and how to give your job descriptions visibility include:
- Working with partners like Venture for Africa who build and maintain internal databases of experienced talent.
- Posting on job boards and premium search services e.g Linkedin Recruiter.
- Advertising on relevant blogs and newsletters.
- Using centralised college career platforms e.g 12Twenty, Handshake.
Reviewing Resumes/Applications
Once your job description is live, using an applicant tracking system (ATS) to receive and review applications is your most efficient bet.
There are a lot of tools in the market (both free and paid) that make this process easier to manage, particularly at scale. From our experience, whatever platform you feel comfortable with, you need to make sure it at least offers the following key features:
- Applicant Tracking: managing all applications, sourced applicants and internal referrals in one place.
- Applicant Communication: real-time applicant engagement, email scheduling, email templates, triggers and automation.
- Collaboration: assigning several levels, roles and responsibilities to different members of your hiring team.
- Commenting: complete log of the applicant history and all actions that have been taken, note-taking, task creation and assignments.
The next set of features are nice-to-haves, but still important to at least consider:
- Applicant scorecards & evaluations: custom feedback forms and scorecards to get feedback on all applicants at every stage of your recruitment process
- Recruiting Pipeline: customise and structure all steps of your recruiting process according to your specific needs
- Recruitment Marketing: the automatic posting of your job ads to relevant job boards/platforms
- Integration: integrate with the applications you already use, from scheduling apps to video-interviewing platforms to take-home testing systems
In the next post in this series, we’ll take a look at skills assessment tests, phone interviews & scoring/grading interviews.
