Job description template: the fields that earn their place

A job description template is one of those documents everyone copies and nobody designs. The result is familiar: three paragraphs about the company, a list of twenty responsibilities in no order of importance, a requirements section that would exclude the person currently doing the job, and no mention of what success would look like.

It is worth doing properly because the document has two lives. Before hiring it decides who applies, which is most of the outcome. Afterwards it is the reference point for probation, objectives and — if things go badly — the conversation about whether the role is being performed.

What a job description template should contain

• Job title, in words the market uses. An internal title nobody searches for costs you applicants before anything else does.
• Purpose of the role in one or two sentences: why the job exists and what would not happen without it.
• Reporting line, and who reports to this role if anyone.
• Five to eight core responsibilities, ordered by how much of the week they occupy — not twenty, and not alphabetical.
• What success looks like in the first six to twelve months, stated concretely. This is the field candidates remember and managers use later.
• Essential requirements, kept genuinely essential — each one excludes people, so each needs a reason tied to the work.
• Desirable requirements, clearly separated, so nobody self-selects out over a preference.
• Practicalities: location and remote arrangement, hours, contract type, salary range, and how to apply.

Publish the salary range. It is increasingly required by law in parts of the US and across the EU under pay-transparency rules — check what applies where you hire — and it is in your interest regardless: ranges filter out mismatches before anyone spends an hour interviewing. Check your local employment law on the rest too, since requirements must be job-related, and wording that screens by age, sex or other protected characteristics creates legal exposure however innocently it was phrased.

Writing it

1. Ask the person doing the job now, or the manager, how last week actually went. Job descriptions written from an org chart describe an imagined role.
2. Write the purpose sentence first. If it takes more than two sentences, the role is probably two roles.
3. List responsibilities by time spent, and cut everything under about five percent of the week — those belong in the interview conversation, not the document.
4. For each essential requirement, write the reason it is essential. Any you cannot justify becomes desirable or disappears — this single pass usually removes a third of the list.
5. Replace years of experience with capability wherever you can. "Has run a payroll cycle end to end" is testable; "five years' experience" is a proxy that excludes good people.
6. Write the success section as three things that would be true after a year.
7. Read it as a candidate: is it clear what you would do on Tuesday, and would you apply?
8. Version and date it, and revisit at the next hire rather than reusing the copy from three years ago.

The description after the hire

Most job descriptions are written once and never opened again, which wastes the most useful thing about them. The document is the natural agenda for a probation review, the starting point for objectives, and the reference when a role drifts — which roles always do. Review it annually against what the person actually does; either the document is out of date, or the job has quietly become something the company did not decide to create. Both are worth knowing.

In Ettex, the master template and each role's version live in Ettex Docs, with templates and outlines so a new role starts from the structure above, threaded comments with @mentions when a manager and whoever hires disagree about a requirement, and version history so you can see how a role changed between hires. Applications fit Ettex Forms, where each submission lands timestamped in one searchable inbox with file uploads for CVs, the candidate pipeline can sit in Ettex CRM, and the offer goes out through Ettex Signature.

The boundary: Ettex is not an applicant tracking system. There is no posting to job boards, no CV parsing or ranking, no candidate portal, no interview scheduling, and no anonymisation or bias tooling. You get a document editor, a form that collects applications into one inbox, and somewhere to track the pipeline. That covers a company hiring a few times a year; hiring continuously, you want an ATS.

What makes job descriptions fail

• A title nobody searches for, which loses candidates before the text is read.
• Twenty responsibilities with no ordering, so the actual job is invisible.
• Requirements that the current post-holder would not meet — the fastest test of whether the list is honest.
• Years of experience standing in for capability, which filters on the wrong axis.
• No salary range, which wastes everyone's time and is unlawful in a growing number of places.
• Company boilerplate at the top and the actual job on page two.
• No statement of what success looks like, leaving both sides to guess for a year.
• Never reviewed, so it describes a role that stopped existing two reorganisations ago.

A job description template earns its place when it produces a page a candidate can act on and a manager can use a year later. Order responsibilities by time, justify every essential requirement, say what success looks like, and publish the range.