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You hire people, you want the best, you are given guidelines to follow, some formal and some informal (e.g pick a woman)…
You find the job description template, write a description and send it off for approval.
The supervisor reads it, sees that it’s comprehensive and approves it, based more on the key selection criteria and the basic job description.
The process continues and you get what you get, a new employee. Hopefully they are a fantastic fit to the team and in a short space of time become a profitable addition to the organisation, however reality tells an all to common different story, at the end of the probation period, the person is ousted and the process begins again. Or worse, the person makes it through the probation period and becomes an anchor weighing things down often for a variety of reasons.
But I have an issue or three with the approach that causes this drama to happen.
Most job descriptions I have seen are too wordy and can actually scare people away from applying, and sometimes those that do apply find the job is not what they thought it would be, or they have the wrong ‘disposition’ (attitude, personality etc) for the job.
I have applied for enough positions to see this first hand and I now believe there should be a more relaxed approach, at least in the first instance.
Okay so there are those who say the idea is to attract more of the right people so you don’t end up getting too many applicants for the role, fair enough, but find another way of doing it rather than trying to bury people in detail and scaring them off.
The ideal employee is probably a fun team player, a person who is interested in more than just the role (it might be seen as an entry role to the organisation). Of course they will have the qualification to do the job, but the right attitude and personality will make them a better fit to the whole system, not just the technical aspects of the role.
Start thinking about how you can get a simpler approach started, then add the details in at another layer if need be.
Simply put, your current processes might just be causing long term headaches for the organisation.
Regards
Steve Gray
