It's easy to copy a job description from another organization. But posting a job advertisement that looks like every other employer won't help you hire someone terrific.

The Problem

Far too many employers get tangled up in defining their job descriptions. In particular, one common mistake is the belief that if one person had a particular set of skills, more people like them must exist. In other words, your star employee Karen had a particular set of skills, so there must be "another Karen" out there in the market---someone that could perfectly fit the Karen-shaped hole she left behind.

Some executives mistakenly think of hiring as an HR function. But hiring cannot be thought of as solely an HR issue, as something separate from the "real work" of the department. Whenever a new hire fails to make a significant business impact, it is a business problem.

HR professionals often treat recruiting separately from employee engagement and retention, but recruiting and retention are two sides of the same coin, with the same basic ingredients. The right recruiting practices can also "bake in" long term employee engagement and retention.

The only reason to hire is to achieve a business impact. Your hiring efforts should shorten the distance between having a job opening and hiring someone who makes a big impact. The first step on the path toward business impact is attracting the right candidates. In all likelihood, most job seekers first impression of your company will be your job description. But most job descriptions actually get in the way of your hiring and recruiting efforts.

Do you use a smart phone? Read restaurant reviews on Yelp? Search for things on Google? Of course you do. Today, Google, mobile devices, and reputation sites are just part of your day. But 15 years ago, smartphones and reputation sites didn’t even exist, and Google was still largely unknown.  Unfortunately, the recruiting practices at most organizations are trapped in a time warp. Most HR teams recruit about the same way they did in 1999. But these now-familiar technologies have fundamentally changed your behavior...and the behavior of your current and future employees.

With the rise of employer reputation sites like Glassdoor, overwhelming dread has overcome HR and senior leadership -- a feeling of Glassdoor Angst. Anonymous reviewers are publicly posting "insider information" outside of management’s control.  In 2014, most CEOs we spoke with didn’t seem to know or care about Glassdoor. But now more than half of the CEOs we speak with mention their Glassdoor reviews in our first meeting.

Every time a dull job description is posted as a job advertisement, your hiring process is already headed down the wrong path. The language used in most job descriptions actually prevents candidates from understanding your job. This slows down your hiring process, wastes your time by interviewing the wrong people, and creates unmet expectations which can lead to high employee turnover.

Job advertisements rarely find all the people you're looking to attract.

Many job titles these days are just fodder for the Stupid Job Title Generator. You know, those silly titles that involve words like ninja, maven or guru.