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.