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WRITING A CONCISE JOB DESCRIPTION: TIPS FOR ENHANCED CLARITY

WRITING A CONCISE JOB DESCRIPTION: TIPS FOR ENHANCED CLARITY

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Writing a clear and concise job description is necessary to attract the required candidates in this time of fast-paced job-hunting era. As there are a lot of job posts being published each day on the internet, reaching out to the right candidate for your job and persuading them to apply can be a difficult task.

Conciseness is an important element of a good job description since it makes the description easier to read and understand. Having one drag needlessly on and on can hurt the chances of getting a nice number of applications.

If you are looking to write such a job description, but can’t figure out how, don’t worry. We will look at some actionable tips that you can follow for it in this post.

Let’s begin.

WRITING A CONCISE JOB DESCRIPTION: TIPS FOR ENHANCED CLARITY

1.Clearly Describe the Role and Responsibilities:

When we talk about making a job description concise, we refer to making it short while conveying all the necessary information. One of the most important pieces of information that your description should contain is the job role and its concomitant responsibilities.

Clearly Describe the Role and Responsibilities

You can take the following steps that will help you clearly describe the role and responsibilities of the job:

  • Add the main job role in big bold text for easy visibility
  • Then, add the smaller tasks and responsibilities of the job in bullets for easy perusal
  • Give examples when mentioning the various roles/responsibilities. For example, writing “Collaborating with a team of developers to reach daily goals e.g., communicating with front-end developers for design implementation,”

If you don’t provide a vivid description of the role and responsibilities of the job, this will hinder the hiring process as a result of miscommunication with the potential candidates.

2. Clearly Describe the Required Qualification and Skills:

Now that you have described what kind of work the candidates will be doing, it’s time to describe what kind of candidates you are interested in. To do so, clearly mention the required qualification and skills in the job description.

Clearly Describe the Required Qualification and Skills

The benefit of doing so is obvious. It will make the candidate understand if they are qualified for the job or not. By this, you can filter the qualified people that can get a chance to work for your company.

While describing the qualification and skills requirements, keep the following things in mind.

  • Explain the most important qualification and skill requirement first. This will help the candidate know if he is eligible for the job or not. You can use words like ‘must-required,’ ‘compulsory skills’ etc. to clarify the basic requirement.
  • Clearly specify the educational qualification that you want the candidate to have.
  • Add the secondary skills and qualifications in the end. If the candidates not having these soft skills and qualifications can also get chosen, mention this in the description. A good way to do this is to simply mention “Preferred” in front of these types of skills.

3.Use Plain and Simple Language:

Being wordy and using needlessly convoluted sentences is antithetical to conciseness.

Use Plain and Simple Language

Simple language increases your transparency and can have a good impact on the reader. Moreover, it also can be helpful to a candidate to make the decision whether he should apply for the job or not.

You can follow these points in order to make your description look plain and simple:

  • Use simple words and avoid jargon.
  • Keep the sentences and paragraphs short.
  • Clearly explain the technical terms being used in the description.
  • Use a simple conversational tone to enhance the readability of your description.

Of course, you don’t have to get this all right in the first try. You can create multiple drafts, each time improving the wording and sentence structure. You can even take some online help for this step by using an online rephrase tool.

How does that work exactly? Well, you can paraphrase your job description using an online tool to get some ideas on how you can make it even simpler. This does largely depend on using a good tool but you can easily find some on the Internet.

4. Format and Structure:

The formatting and structure of the description also play a role in its conciseness. The same text/content written with a proper format/structure can look concise, and totally clunky if written haphazardly.

When writing your job description, you should follow the standard paragraph-bullets format. It’s not actually a standard, per se, but it is followed by a lot of companies. Such a description essentially involves a paragraph that outlines the main theme of the job, followed by lists of the job requirements and the activities included in the job role.

This can also help in the conciseness and clarity of the job description since bulleted information is easy to write in a short and summarized form. Plus, they are easy to peruse, which makes them even better to use in a description.

Here is what this format typically looks like. We’ve taken this image from Betterteam:

Format and Structure

5. Review the Description to Remove Errors:

Before finalizing the description, review it to remove any errors in order to ensure its clarity and accuracy.

You can check things like grammatical and spelling errors, etc., and remove them before finalizing the description.

The presence of these errors can be harmful for two reasons:

  1. It can make the description difficult to understand
  2. It can have an adverse effect on the reputation of the company.

You can simply proofread the description you’ve written a couple of times to find these types of errors.

Conclusion:

Hiring the right people for your company is necessary for its smooth running. And hiring proper professionals is only possible if you prepare an excellent job description.

In this post, we’ve looked at some tips that you can follow to create a concise and engaging job description. Follow them all meticulously and you will be on your way to find the best members for your company.

Smirti
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