Writing a job description

Photos: Cottonbro on Pexels and (insert) Matthew Henry on Burst

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

Introduction

As someone who knows the project well and has thought a lot about it, you are potentially well placed to draft job descriptions (JDs) for the Services manager if you need to create new roles.. 

In my opinion (and very limited experience actually doing it!) the assessor will look at your j.d. to better understand the project: 

• What are the tasks this person is going to do? [Task list]
• Will they have the knowledge, skills, experience and attitudes to do them [Person specification]
• Will they be paid enough to attract a good enough person? [Pay scale; also number of days worked is a fundamental]
• Are they based in a sensible location for the work? [Location]

All these points expand on something in the main bid document. So, any last-minute changes need to be checked against the JD, as well!

You’re not necessarily trying to produce something that will actually be sent to a candidate. If you can go a bit further and create an actual great JD, that sells the work well to candidates, all good. Bear in mind that the Services manager might want to just send your JD out to candidates! However, from a fundraising perspective, writing the extra trimmings that make it a great JD are something you can leave out to save time.

The hardest things, in practice, are: 

• It can represent another, finer, level of detail about the work, which needs some time from the Services manager to check
• Drafting JDs is best done late in the process – meaning that you’re probably a bit bored of the project, possibly tired, feeling under pressure and suddenly trying to see things from a different perspective. It’s easy to have a mental block. (I find a trawl for related JDs is very helpful with that.)

Go online and there’s a mountain of good advice on drafting JDs. The following tries to give a “how to as a trust fundraiser”…

Don’t attempt the work before the key decisions about the role have been taken

Roles aren’t generic. For example, the tasks and person spec for an Advice Officer will be quite different if they have to set the service up from scratch, or they have to recruit and manage volunteers to deliver part of the Advice Service.

You should start the process of drafting by analyzing:

• Why is this role in existence?
• How does it differ from those described in JDs you’ve found for analogous work?
• What falls outside typical requirements – what does it need to do and what can be left out?
• How will it work with / support other roles, especially in the realization of the project?
• If it replaces a previous role (or even continues funding an existing role): what changes in the new version?

Look into the role, even though you know the project well

The key questions are; 

• What are the core functions of the role? Everyone’s job has a central point to it and a few central elements, as well as other things they also need to get done. If the core of the job isn’t clear, you may not get someone who’d good to deliver that core
• What do you have to do to fulfil the role? You probably didn’t need to think as deeply about this, but if you can find half a dozen JD.s for similar roles they will help you to do so

Substantive issues

• It’s often easy to find similar-ish job descriptions by visiting different recruitment websites, such as The Guardian or CharityJob, or by Googling for them.
• Sometimes it’s not clear what the key points for the person spec are. In that case, I just list the options and send them to the Services manager to choose. (As always: it’s not your project, you’re just doing the leg work for people.)
• The person spec should be realistic to recruit against it: 
  • People in a particular type of role have common characteristics – for example, trust fundraisers are good writers and researchers, but don’t normally have a degree in neuroscience. If you try and make the post cover too many bases, it may be hard to recruit. Sometimes you can deal with that by separating roles into part-time posts, though it’s not ideal to have a big team of separate part-time staff.
  • There’s a balance between satisfying the funder that you’ll get someone good enough and being realistically capable of finding someone. If there’s a problem there, the chances are that there’s a mistake in the project design. 
  • A good person spec covers the key knowledge, skills, experience, formal qualifications and attitudes required for the role. There’s nothing in it that isn’t actually required for the role. (That’s against Equal Opps practice and in some cases, law.)
• It should be both clear and sensible as to which characteristics are essential and which are desirable. That’s not always easy to do if you’ve been making lots of claims about the work in the application. However, if all characteristics are essential then, again, you might not recruit. What I’ve done about this when there’s a problem is to talk (in the section of the application about our skills and experience) about our past experience of recruiting candidates with broad skills and experience.
• It’s worth reading the organisation’s pay / remuneration policy, to see what grade your post is likely to come out at. It will help you a little with wording, to ensure you’re getting it right. However, if you think that the pay for that grade looks uncompetitive compared to the amounts you’ve seen in job ads, the best way to argue for a higher salary is not to change the person spec but to ask the charity (usually, HR) to agree a small premium for that post, based on the issue of recruitment. The couple of times this has come up for me, I’ve done it during the bid writing and said the application may be rejected otherwise. That seemed to work.
• As my editor, Robyn McAllister pointed out, it’s worth checking if the charity has standard requirements for all roles / all roles of a particular kind.

Writing style on the JD

• You are writing this for the funder (though hopefully it will be reused!) so when they read it, it’s best that it’s immediately clear how it relates to the application. This is an issue when reusing existing JDs and you might want to try and agree changes in language, tasks and (if the post is vacant) in the person spec.
• If it’s a new post, you should try and follow the house style, to make it as easy to use as possible. Get the latest template, the house style evolves a lot in some charities.
• The whole JD Should be jargon-free and specific, suitable to communicate clearly to candidates. (If you were looking at a job ad, you might be more likely to open one for a Senior Trust and Statutory Officer than for a “fundraiser”.)
• The elements of the person spec should be discrete and specific, but there shouldn’t be more than 15 or so of them. In charities, the person spec will usually be the basis for selection and the dozen or so interview questions plus any interview exercise will be to test the different elements of it. (If there seem to be too many, I send the Services manager a list and tell them to eliminate some of the least important, to get the number down.)
• I suspect that gender- and ethnicity-biased language will start becoming noticed in our field. There are online sites that you can paste the text of your JD into, that will spot if your application is possibly signalling a bias in either of these regards.