Setting the Job Brief
A few months ago, I wrote about how to find the right person through an interview process. One of the most important parts of that process was to know the destination before you have begun the journey. Recruitment comes about for a range of reasons. You might be replacing someone who has moved on, someone who has retired, it may be a new position due to business expansion or it may be a new business requirement for a change in service or technology.
Anyone in the HR and recruitment process will know the mundane activity of writing a job brief, but there are so many important questions to ask yourself before you go about finding that new star to join your team. If you are taking up bird watching, you aren’t going to bring a magnifying glass. If you are starting with the wrong tools, you are only setting yourself up for failure. Here is a short, but not exhaustive list of things I have tried to think about or ask myself over the years before backfilling or going on the hunt for a new employee.
1.?????How did this position become vacant?
I know, it seems obvious, but this absolutely has to be the first step. Replacing a person who has retired from your organisation is a vastly different recruit to adding an additional team member due to business expansion. Answering this question is about setting YOUR expectations as a hiring manager. This is where you mark out the start line for your hiring process.
2.?????What will be the basic functions of this role? Or, what do we need?
It is essential to ask – “what am I expecting this ROLE (not person) to contribute to the business?”. That must be the cornerstone of your recruitment goal and will help determine the type of person who will be successful in undertaking it. Taking a completely black and white approach to this question, its important to understand what the role contributes to the business, otherwise you will be trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from another box. For example, at its most simple you might say “this role is responsible for handling basic HR enquiries by phone and email, which is approximately 25 per day”. You can then decide what kind of skills would be beneficial to undertaking that function and interweave the type of soft skills required to handle the clientele and represent your organisational values.
As a last note, you may at this point ask, ‘is this position still needed’? That opens a whole new can of worms, but when observing what the role contributes to the business, it is a good opportunity to see whether this resource may be better used elsewhere.
3.?????What is a requirement, and what is negotiable?
Again, this is about setting YOUR expectations. When going into the market to buy a house, there’s no doubt we all want a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage, 800 square metre block right in our preferred location for under $500K. The reality is that we will likely need to make concessions about what we want and what we need. The same is true in recruitment. While you may well come across that unicorn that sounds like they flew in on a shooting star to fill your recruitment needs, chances are you may need to make concessions on your expectations. Sitting down and identifying what is non-negotiable for the role and what you can afford to wait for or go without is important.
Remember that skills can always be learned. Additional questions to help with this might be: do we have a timeline that allows a new addition to learn the job requirements or do they need to hit the ground running? Are our systems and training methods user friendly or are they built for experienced users? Is our business requiring an experienced head to help with rapid growth or can our new team member grow as we grow?
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4.?????People are NOT replaceable (so don’t expect person B to be an exact replica of person A)
Before you start singing Beyonce at me, let me clarify my point. People’s skills are absolutely replaceable. No one is so essential to their business that it cannot function without them. Adaptability is the very basis of evolution. When someone leaves, we fill the hole however we can to keep things running.
People do however contribute to their workplace in so many different ways. Sally might be a sales representative that helps the accounts team when they’re behind and runs all the social events at the office. She makes clients feel special and colleagues feel supported.
The problem is that we can sometimes try to hire another Sally – don’t. People’s skills are replaceable, but what someone brings in terms of culture, problem-solving, enthusiasm, collaboration is different. Remember the goal of the hiring process: find a sales representative that understands our business and builds good relationships.
It is not: find a sales representative like Sally that has all of Sally’s business knowledge and interacts with people the way Sally did; keep your mind open to what a new person brings to the role.
5.?????How will you attract what you are after?
In step 2 you identified exactly what is needed in this role to contribute and create success in the business. In step 3 you maintained your expectation to know what a candidate must have, and what would be nice for them to have. This step is about understanding how you attract those candidates.
If you cast a fishing rod up a tree, you’re never going to catch a fish. Think of who you are trying to ‘catch’ and make sure the following is appropriate:
As a last note, it is important to put yourself in your prospective candidates’ shoes. Have you outlined the potential career path, reporting line and salary banding? Have you outlined what makes you different? What sets you apart from your competitors? Look at your position description, or advertisement and ask "what would make someone apply for this role".
Don’t begin your search before adequately defining what you are searching for. Recruitment tactics, methodologies and timelines are as varied as the candidates themselves. Once you have defined the destination, you can appropriately map out the best way to undertake the journey.