The people engagement and recruitment process in small business can be tricky. After the task of identifying the needs of your business, Kristy-Lee Billet of Footprint Recruitment suggests that the next step is to outline job descriptions and target your market accordingly.
“Job descriptions in my opinion, as a HR professional, are the most important documents you can have in your office, almost more important than an employment contract.”
Stressing the importance of such a document, Kristy-Lee says all business owners should write down clear job descriptions for all employees.
“It basically is your rule book and, without rules people make their own.”
“If you’re not setting clear expectations for what you expect your employee or your contractor or your outsource provider to do in the way of a job description or something similar, they will make it up for themselves, and you won’t get what you expect.”
Outlining clear job roles means that as a business owner you are getting exactly what you need from your employee/contractor/outsourcer and it also means that when advertising job vacancies, you are targeting the right candidates for the role. Other than clearly outlining expectations, additional benefits of role descriptions are that they:
- Provide a basis for measuring job performance. A team member is either fulfilling or not fulfilling the role according to the description.
- Ensure clarity for the employee around the scope of their role. They know what they need to do, and the scope of their term of employment.
- Enable you to more easily hire another person in the same role.
- Creates an organisational structure that separates you, and others as individuals, from the roles essential for your business.
- Provides references for areas of the business that will require training and/or procedures to be documented
- Outlines areas for performance review and development
“By the third time I had to hire a receptionist in my business I had had enough of verbally inducting and training team members. Writing a role description allowd me to make recruitment of the next person faster, and freed me up to be able to leverage the training of that staff member in the relevant procedures,” explains Australian Businesswomen’s Network’s CEO, Suzi Dafnis
While it may take some time to set up role descriptions the first time, they will become part of your ‘this is how we do it here’ kit to running your small business. Kristy-Lee presents the Hire, Contract or Outsource? Course, which looks at Practical ways to grow and manage your small business team. Learn more about Kristy-Lee, here.
