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Hire Smarter, Not Harder
Make Your Job Descriptions Work for You.
It’s really, really expensive to hire the wrong person. According to Career Builder, the cost of a bad hire is roughly 30% of that person’s annual salary. And that doesn’t take into consideration the hit to company morale, which is not easily quantified.
As a writer, I’m here to tell you that one of the key ways companies can avoid the mistake of making a bad hire is in shoring up the job description. I’ve read plenty of them, and some of them are spot-on, while others are a nightmare.
Take, for example, a recent job I held where the overall title was “Documentation Specialist.” Innocuous enough, right? Maybe. But the primary requirements included knowledge of Adobe DC, Microsoft Word, and a technical writing tool known as Confluence. These are all skills I possess and at which I am quite proficient. What the description lacked, however, was asking that I also have mastery of technical illustration, editing those illustrations, and a proficiency in some aspects of photoshop and illustrator. My lack of expertise in these showed almost immediately, and I admitted to this. I simply was not a good fit for the job. I’m a writer and editor, not an illustrator and graphic designer.
A job description I read not long ago asked for an Associate Executive Manager…
