Most Job Descriptions are Turn-Offs

Have you read any of the jobs posted on job boards or company career pages?  Most of what I see doesn’t really describe the job at all.  What is does is describe the person the company wants to hire.  There is a real problem with this in that often times the person you really want to hire won’t fit the description!

Strategic Employers need to set a goal of only hiring high performance employees.  To maintain competitive edge and profitability they have to attract, select, and retain the best people.   With or without a recession, it will be getting harder to find these people.  One reason is the labor pool of top talent is shrinking.  Another is that top talent is rarely looking for your jobs.  They will not see your job description and, if it is like most of the stuff posted, it will not entice them to respond.

A Strategic Employer attracts superior people by defining superior performance – not a set of selection criteria.  Results, which should be the main concern of a Strategic Employer, comes from performance, not skills and qualifications.  You want to find people who are competent and motivated to get the results you want.  They may not always match the skills and qualifications you list.  Ask yourself if you’d rather have a person who can get the job done with superior results or would you rather have a person who matched a set of skills and qualifications?  If you must compromise, do so with the skill match not on the performance.

When you write a job description to attract top performers, write about what they get to do.  Write about the performance expected.  Don’t focus so much on what they need to “have”, focus on the “results” they need to get.  Top performers will not want your job because they match the qualifying criteria.  They want the job because they get to do new and challenging things and achieve a higher level of results.

Strategic Employers know that they can’t attract, select, and retain the old way.  Attracting top talent means being focused on performance instead of qualifications. When you change to this approach you’ll increase the quality of talent you attract.