Many companies may write job descriptions once and then never again, but few roles ever stay the same. It’s essential to periodically revisit your existing job descriptions and make sure they are still relevant and accurate, especially as business needs or processes change.
Job description reviews are critical to making sure each employee knows what they need to accomplish in their role and what goals they should set to help them succeed. A regular job description review process also ensures that your job postings are up-to-date and makes sure that you’re giving candidates all the relevant information and qualifications needed to succeed.
3 Steps to a Job Description Review
- Review the qualifications and skills for the role.
- Update the job requirements.
- Review the work environment.
How to Conduct a Job Description Review
By following the step-by-step job description review process below, you can feel confident about having accurate and clear representations of the skills and experience needed to fulfill any position in your company.
1. Review Qualifications and Skills for the Role
The first thing you should do is review the necessary qualifications and the required skills, abilities and experience required for a particular role. This should be a statement of minimum qualifications, because it may well be that many of the needed skills can be supplied through training and on-the-job experience.
Speak with current employees or direct managers about what an average day in a given role looks like to get an accurate snapshot. There may be some things that have changed since you originally drafted the description. It’s also a good time to review what will make someone successful. Think about what has made others successful in this role and then determine whether there are other areas that this position can have an impact on.
The next thing you should consider is how this job description review can impact others in the department or anyone who has a similar role. You want everyone to be successful and don’t want to create an unfair work environment where one person is given preferential treatment over someone else doing the same work.
Lastly, confirm that the skills you have written down previously are still required. It’s possible that you may prefer candidates who are familiar with a particular software or who have specific industry expertise. If so, make sure this is listed in the description. You should consider whether the experience you are asking for is a deal-breaker or if it is something that can be taught early into the person’s employment.
2. Update the Job Requirements
Describing the physical and mental requirements needed for a position is the next part of the job description review. If there are any physical requirements, these should be listed to avoid any later misunderstandings or discrimination issues. If your new employee will be required to do physically strenuous activities or must sit at a desk for extended periods, then make sure your description lists this.
It’s also a good opportunity to review whether this is a job that is performed on-site, remotely or in a hybrid environment. Speak to a direct manager, and ask them what they require to be most effective. When the description was originally written, this may not have been an option.
Doing this review of the requirements is always a good idea and usually a quick exercise. You can also use generative AI tools to help draft or edit a job, ensuring that it includes all of the necessary job requirements, qualifications and skills required for the role.
3. Review the Work Environment
After you describe the requirements, it would be a good time to think about the overall company culture and how the team collaborates. Think about how you can best describe the environment — even a small amount of detail can help a candidate picture themselves at the organization and prepare them to discuss work environment expectations in a potential interview.
Using AI to Review Job Descriptions
Artificial intelligence can help companies review job descriptions more efficiently by checking for things like clarity, completeness, potential biases and even search engine optimization. It can flag confusing statements, suggest a friendlier tone and ensure the language aligns with both industry standards and the company’s brand. It can also compare descriptions against similar roles to spot any missing skills or qualifications, making it easier for hiring teams to create job postings that attract a broader range of candidates. And it can do this all at scale, quickly analyzing hundreds of job descriptions at once to ensure consistency and quality across an entire organization.
In short: AI can not only make job descriptions more clear and inclusive, but it can also speed up the entire review process — helping businesses save time, reach more qualified applicants and support fairer, more effective hiring.
Why Is It Important to Review Your Job Descriptions?
Reviewing job descriptions may not be top of mind for executives when the company isn’t hiring, but a regular job description review process does serve a vital purpose.
These descriptions can serve as a baseline for performance reviews and compensation strategies, and they inform employees exactly what is expected of them in the way of performance. It also helps them understand whether they are successful in their role and what they need to do to be promoted.
Because roles tend to evolve over time thanks to the addition of new tools, expanding project scopes, employee departures and more, keeping job descriptions up to date will prevent a fire drill if you need to hire quickly. If you aren't regularly reviewing your job descriptions, you may find yourself rushing to do so at a non-optimal time.
Many of the “urgent” situations executives might find themselves dealing with could even be prevented if they had the right hires supporting them. Start by having accurate, specific and clearly communicated job descriptions and key performance indicators in place that your team can strive to accomplish.
Job descriptions serve as guides to performance, especially during employee reviews and compensation discussions. When you have accurate and current job descriptions in place, they can serve as the basis for creating an equitable pay scale in the company and helping to fill skills gaps. You might find after conducting a job description review that you have redundancies in your team, or that you have gaps that should be filled with a new hire. Even if you don't have gaps that make sense to hire a full-time employee to fill, an outsourced company or fractional hire can take on those tasks or roles so they aren't being overlooked or attempted by an employee who doesn’t have the necessary experience.
Advantages of Job Description Reviews
1. Sets Clear Job Expectations
Having well-written job descriptions makes the hiring process much easier on everyone. When you have accurate and clear job descriptions, you should get well-qualified candidates who have the requisite skills needed by your company as well as the soft skills that may make them a culture fit.
Rewriting job descriptions and updating them so that they accurately reflect what you expect could also help current employees better understand their responsibilities. This is separate however from giving them quarterly and annual goals. The description is meant to be more of a broad idea of what to expect and things they should be focusing on, not for listing out all the specifics of each task.
2. Saves Time in Hiring and Recruitment
Reviewing job descriptions to make sure they are up-to-date can also save a great deal of time in the recruitment and interviewing processes, because you can weed out candidates who aren’t a good fit. If your job descriptions are not clear and accurate, it might cause a qualified candidate to feel that they were misled by the description, which can lead to job dissatisfaction or early quitting. Look beyond just making a job description accurate and think about what kind of new hire you are looking to attract.
3. Can Provide Legal Protections for Companies
One other advantage of having solid and specific job descriptions is that they protect your company after a termination. When a new employee doesn’t work out, it’s usually because they failed to meet expectations as stated in the job description. If a new hire fails to live up to those expectations and termination becomes necessary, the job description can be pointed to as the documentation for employee performance. This is another reason to add some metrics and performance indicators that spell out what will make an employee successful in the position.
Job description reviews are an important part of the hiring process and for fairly assessing your current employees. By regularly reviewing and updating your job descriptions, you can ensure that they are accurate, clear and helpful to both candidates and current employees.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a job description review?
A job description review is the process of evaluating and updating an existing job description to ensure it accurately reflects the current open job title, job purpose, responsibilities, qualifications, work environment and role expectations. This helps guide hiring, performance evaluations, compensation decisions and employee development.
How often are job descriptions reviewed?
Job descriptions should be reviewed at least once a year, or when a business’s needs, tools or team structures evolve. Proactive, periodic reviews are encouraged, even when there is no urgent hiring process.
Who is responsible for updating job descriptions?
HR professionals, hiring managers, recruiters or department leaders can all be responsible for reviewing and updating job descriptions as needed. Job description reviews are often a collaborative process between relevant employees to ensure all information is correct and every requirement for the description is being met.
