The Job Description: An Endangered Species

January 13, 2016

Are the days of the Job Description numbered?

Here at Venture Stream, over the past two years, we have hired 10 people and with a couple of exceptional exceptions those people were hired after a process that I’m sure most readers of this post will be familiar with:

1. Grow your business / take on more work
2. Need more talent to continue growth / fulfil work
3. Think of the kind of role you need most
4. Write a Job Description
5. Get approached / hassled by agencies (despite stating ‘no agencies’)
6. Receive dozens of applicants
7. Sift through applicants
8. Conduct initial phone interviews
9. Get people in for a face-to-face interview
10. Repeat steps 7-9
11. Make a decision
12. Offer them a job
13. Hire them

This process can often be lengthy, but hopefully worth it in the end. However, what has continued to happen when we have recruited is either an indication of how poor we are at writing Job Descriptions or an indication of how poor Job Descriptions are at helping you find the best talent for your business.

What Job Descriptions don’t do is allow for curve balls.

They don’t allow you to think outside of the parameters that you set.

They don’t always present you with the best picture of what might be beneficial to your business.

Most of the hires that we have made have not been a good fit for the advertised role based on their CV, their skills and our initial idea of what role we needed to fill and therefore what Job Description we have written.

It is perhaps a testament to our rather unique approach to consulting; looking at the whole rather than the component parts, that we often chop and change our minds when it comes to what role we need and what person we should hire based on those individuals that apply and the people we meet.

After all, it’s people you hire; not roles. We will only continue our growth and success if we continue to hire exceptional talent, good people, passionate marketers, skilled developers, and creative minds, and those people who you know you just have to hire even if they don’t tick all of the boxes on your latest Job Description.

Having said all of that, rather ironically, we continue to attempt to capture what we think we’re after in the form of a Job Description, and we currently have two of them out in the wild:

PR & Content Marketing Consultant
Front End Web Developer / Designer

But if you’re interested in what we do, have a passion for it, and a talent for it, but you don’t quite fit the descriptions we’ve put together, don’t let that stop you.

We want people, not roles.

Get in touch today and help us prove that the days of the Job Description are numbered.