Job Description or Job Requirements?

I've spent - we all have - thousands of hours in front of whiteboards or editors designing out in great detail what a system needs to do. We all know full time business analysts who's entire existence is based around the detailed description of the way systems need to work.

Why don't we do the same for the people we are trying to hire?

Apart from the fuzziness of dealing with humans rather than computers - pesky people - otherwise very structured people tend to fall apart around job descriptions. For years I've described what I do as "stuff" rather than going into any greater detail, just because of the effort required to break it down and explain it.

With 75% of programmer jobs being largely putting pretty front ends on databases and a lot of system administration being similarly dull why would a prospective employee plump for your company rather than somewhere else? Every company has interesting, unique problems and maybe we should be taking some time to write them down.

Having had the unusual luxury over the last few months of writing down requirements for outsourcers and then having to code part of that system I was reminded of something I'd forgotten:

Doing some up front analysis really helps

Kind of obvious, but easy to forget. When I sat down to write this post I had this in mind since it saved so much time in my previous lives. For some positions I'd had a job description (even if I hadn't shared it completely until after the person was hired) that I'd carried from pre-recruitment through to their first annual assessment. Even though it had cost me in each case significant time, sometimes a bit of sleep and significant coffee it had made those follow up tasks trivial.

This contrasted strongly with those people (I'll say sorry now) where the JD had been unrelated to the actual criteria that they were then to be assessed on annually. These had always ended up in a mess where the review was a compromise and didn't actually tell anyone - the employee, me or the company - how they'd done that year.

Just like a project's requirements a Job Description isn't set in stone and can adapt over time. But just like that project it helps a lot if you've done some of the analysis up front.

The right brief

When I first started looking around for jobs around a (long) while ago I was always perplexed why there was such an emphasis on X years experience in different tools and technologies. It was good to have a giggle about the request for 5 years experience in a system that had only existed for 2. And we've all seen the ads for someone with a raft of experience for less than money than you'd get filling shelves at a supermarket.

So I've written job descriptions not too far off that, even though in my own head I should know better - 4 years of this or 10 years of that. And they were never very effective. We ended up going through CV after CV that technically met the criteria but weren't right.

The best results always came from briefing agents and saying all the things that weren't on the job description - all the soft things that were really hard to write down, the real job description. I've worked with some stunning agents but the best of the best have always been the ones that knew the candidate and knew the job.

An answer should have been just to write down all those soft things as a job description that were being missing out on. But then I got no CVs through from agents. The annoying fact was that the tools those very good agents were using just didn't lend themselves to sort of tools that the agents were using to scrounge CVs in the first place.

The irony of all those thousands of job ads demanding x years experience is often because we can't describe accurately the sort of skills and experiences we actually want. As laughable as 20 years in .Net is or irrelevant as 10 years in mobile they are the shorthand we use for describing the sort of person we are after. Annoyingly, given this to work with the employment industry has optimised their tools for just this sort of vagueness and have done it admirably well.

We should be giving the agents a decent chance though - proper briefings, verbal or written, increase our chances of finding the right candidate with the right skills.