Is Your Company Ready for Job Description Software?

Written by Jon Spratt | Sep 16, 2019 4:00:00 AM

If you’re involved in managing your company’s talent, you’re probably wearing a lot of different hats.

Thankfully, the HR technology space has exploded in recent years with automation tools to make your life easier & help you spend your time on strategic, priority matters.

But software that helps talent management personnel manage one crucial piece of the talent management puzzle, job descriptions, is only just coming to prominence.

Job Descriptions: Overlooked & Underutilized?

We believe that job descriptions serve as a foundational document in effective talent management programs – or at least, they should.

The reality is that for many people in your shoes, creating and managing job descriptions is a necessary evil: something that has to be done, but something that’s a drain on time, resources and energy (given that they’re often tossed into a filing cabinet as soon as a candidate is on board.)

Time For a Change

It doesn’t have to be that way. If your job description process faces challenges, you’re not alone; we’ve heard it from hundreds of people who have felt the same way that you do.

So when is it time to act for change?

Here are some of the common trends we've seen in the people and companies that have been turning to HRSG’s job description software to help them solve their job description challenges.

3 Signs That Your Company Is Ready for Job Description Software

1. Your organization empowers their talent management personnel with the tools they need to spend their time smartly.

We recently surveyed over 100 HR professionals about their job description process.

89% of them told us they spend an hour or more crafting every job description they work on.

They browse the internet, they copy other company’s publicly available descriptions, they gather input from their internal experts and hiring managers.

In companies that have ongoing hiring needs, this adds up to a whole lot of time and aggravation.

With the tools we’ve built into CompetencyCore, we’re hearing that people are building their draft job descriptions in as little as 7 minutes.

Don’t take it from us; our implementation specialist, Brian, recently got this email from a client he was training, 8 minutes after their session was complete:

“Hey Brian - - First job built!! this is super intuitive!!”

Bottom line: it’s important to do job descriptions right, but it’s also important to have systems in place that allow you to spend your time on your strategic business goals instead of administrative tasks.

Check out the video below to see how CompetencyCore's job description builder functionality helps you do this.

2. You don’t view ‘job posts’ as an acceptable substitution for proper ‘job descriptions.’

When most people hear "job posting," their mind probably goes to the disposable, quick summaries that you toss up on Indeed or your internal job boards.

But the companies that are using proper job descriptions as a central, guiding document to define employees roles are the ones who are ahead of the game. They’re the ones who have systems in place to build great HR and talent management programs.

Here are three basic differences between a ‘job post’ and a ‘job description.’ Does your company make the distinction?


	Job Post	Job Description
Main Purpose	Post online to attract candidates for vacant jobs	Defines the key knowledge, skills and abilities required for success in a role
Usage Throughout The Employee Lifecycle	Generally not used or referred back to beyond the hiring process	Used frequently as a central document for HR and talent management programs
Standardization	Often lacking uniformity from one department to the next	Standardized, dynamic talent management records where the data can feed into others

If your organization is ready to reap the benefits of standardized, effective job descriptions, then it’s time to look at purpose-built job description software to help you get started.

3. You want to make sure that your company’s job descriptions are updated over time (and that it’s not difficult to do so).

In that recent survey of HR professionals we mentioned, 43% of respondents told us that job descriptions in their organization are never updated.

This means that as roles evolve over time (as most positions tend to in the modern workforce), there’s essentially no record of that evolution.

It’s not hard to see why this can pose issues on a variety of fronts:

From a compliance perspective, that original job description is no longer a valid record of the job requirements.
From a performance and compensation perspective, the job description no longer serves as an accurate record of the tasks and responsibilities that the job entails.
From a hiring perspective, if the incumbent leaves the organization or moves on to a different role, you’re left scrambling to create a new job description if that role has changed from when they started.

… not to mention a host of other potential issues that could crop up from an employee engagement perspective.