With a generic job description, it’s hard to pick the right candidate. Because? Because traditional job descriptions are unfocused and do a poor job of differentiating between great and mediocre candidates. Without effective decision-making tools, there is a great danger that you will choose the candidate who is simply best for interviews. You need a job description that focuses on your priorities and helps you choose among similarly qualified candidates.

With that goal in mind, here are three ideas you can implement right away to transform your generic job description into a personalized hiring compass: Define the mission of the position; define performance objectives for the role; Define the emotional intelligence knowledge and skills for the position.

Define Mission

Define the role’s mission: Write a one-line “mission statement” for the role. For a vice president of human resources, it might be “helping ABC Company recruit and keep energetic people who share our values ​​and helping us create a workplace of trust, customer focus, and profitability.” The value of summarizing the mission in a single line is that it forces you to choose the essential points of the work. Identifying the essentials of the job will help you avoid a common mistake: namely, you want to avoid turning down the best candidate because they failed to meet a non-essential job requirement. Our goal is to find the best candidate to accomplish the essentials of the job.

define achievement

Define achievement goals for the role: Write down the top 3-4 things the person will need to do excellently to accomplish the mission of the role. Use numbers, percentages, dollar signs, and dates to embed accountability and set clear expectations. If choosing the three or four most important goals is difficult, expand it to six or seven. If seven is not enough, restructure the job so that there are no more than seven. First, decades of brain research show that humans can keep six or seven balls in the air, at most. Second, a narrower focus will help us finer differentiate between candidates.

Define knowledge and personnel

Define the technical knowledge and personal skills for the position: Write down ten to fifteen technical skills or personal qualities that the person must possess. Go beyond platitudes like “integrity” and “respect for others” and spend time considering the values ​​that set your culture apart. Various examples may include: willingness to help when “it’s not their job”, accepting and learning from feedback, ticking the clock vs. staying “until the job is done”, and enthusiasm. Whether it’s a CEO or executive assistant role, these values ​​impact office chemistry and performance.

When you’re done, you’ll have turned a long list of qualifications into a hiring compass that will point you to the right candidate or no candidate at all. A traditional job description asks: Does this candidate have at least seven years of marketing management experience, including CRM supervision? A hiring compass asks: What does this resume tell us about the likelihood that this candidate will successfully lead and manage the process of installing our new $5 million CRM system by the end of this year, on or off budget? The first question asks you to check a box. The second question asks you to think about the candidate and the objective in a much broader and more results-oriented sense. This way of thinking doesn’t take much longer, but it does result in better hiring decisions.