How Job Descriptions Developed, and Where They’re Headed for the Future of Work

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As recruiters, we have probably all written job descriptions on numerous occasions. And for diversity recruiters, there is increasing emphasis on making these descriptions more inclusive, as they should be.

But do you ever stop and think, will this really attract the right potential candidates for the role? How can I be sure this job description will achieve what we need it to as an organization?

If you find yourselves asking those questions, you are not alone.

Just like other long-established aspects of the hiring process, the job description is under fire as being outdated and ineffective. Here at Team JTC, we wanted to understand more about this ongoing debate, so we investigated the history of job descriptions to discover “why we do what we do” and how this might be changing. Today, I will share those findings with you and also suggest some ways in which the job description can be adapted to better serve the needs of recruiters in the 21st century, rather than the 20th century.

Perhaps I am getting a little ahead of myself there, but as I have just hinted, our story begins more than 100 years ago, at a time of rapid change during the Second Industrial Revolution.

It All Started With Job Analysis…

As explained in an earlier article, modern management structures emerged as large corporations came to dominate the US economy and needed to organize growing workforces with increasingly specialized job roles. Around the turn of the 20th century, “job analysis” was developed as a management tool to facilitate these ongoing changes. It can be traced back to two of the founders of industrial–organizational psychology, Frederick Taylor and Lillian Gilbreth.

Today, Taylor is also regarded as the originator of the “scientific management” movement that focused on improving efficiency and productivity in industrial workplaces. His ideas became widely influential after he published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. The first formal job descriptions soon followed, around the time of World War I, as a spin-off from his concept of the job specification. They were developed to convey “a carefully prepared, well-arranged, detailed job summary of all or most of the characteristics of the job.”

How Job Descriptions Developed Over Time

A recent scholarly review described three generations of job description and can help us understand how they changed over time. Initially, job descriptions focused only on work tasks and activities, perhaps reflecting the industrial context in which they originated.

Second-generation job descriptions can be traced back to the 1960s and incorporate employee characteristics and competencies (i.e., those that are required to do the job’s tasks and activities). These descriptions have the advantage that they can be linked to performance, and they also enable better use of the workforce’s skills.

Third-generation job descriptions extend to the present day, and include a focus on non-job roles and competencies because these can also impact employee and organizational performance. This might include, for example, teamworking skills, in recognizing that “we all have to perform roles… outside our basic job description.”

It is also important to mention how job descriptions increasingly came to specify minimum qualifications such as a bachelor’s degree. The number of jobs requiring a degree slowly increased from around the 1930s onward (especially for managerial roles), then gathered pace starting in the 1970s, and further accelerated in the 2000s. I covered this history of “credentialism” and its impact on underrepresentation and increasing diversity in another newsletter. However, it bears repeating here because job descriptions often list required qualifications that are used to define who can do the job (or not). We will return to this point later, because it illustrates one important way in which some job descriptions are already changing.

Where Are Job Descriptions Headed in the Future?

In identifying areas that need to change (and in some cases are already changing), three related criticisms can be leveled at conventional job descriptions. I will summarize them here and briefly touch on some possible solutions, but I also encourage you to build on these starting points by actively discussing these ideas where you work.

First, we are asking job descriptions to do something they were never designed for. Job analysis and job descriptions were originally applied to industrial jobs, largely in the manufacturing sector, that now only account for a minority of jobs in the US. The transformation to a knowledge economy has undermined the usefulness of traditional job descriptions.

What this means for employers is, “Organizational performance is much more than successfully completing the sum total of the technical requirements in the job description… Non-job work has become more and more relevant to organizational performance.” Essentially, good job descriptions should reflect this and be formulated as more complete role descriptions. Another emerging alternative is to use job scorecards, which make it much clearer to job seekers what they would actually be doing in the role.

Second, job descriptions are too generic. In the words of one author, “If you pull up job descriptions from five different companies, you’ll find them close enough to be mind-numbing.”

Why is this? Because they’re often trying to cover too many bases and can end up being vague and long-winded. Job seekers, hiring managers, and HR staff are all looking for something different from them. This can make for long, uninspiring job descriptions that will not attract qualified candidates or tell them what it’s like to work for the organization.

Third, job descriptions often focus on qualifications when employers really need knowledge, skills and abilities. In other words, employers tend to assess qualifications as a “skills proxy” rather than testing for those skills directly. I mentioned the recent shift toward skills-based hiring in a previous newsletter and explained how it benefits diversity recruitment. It is also leading some employers to drop the degree requirement, which is great news for job seekers from historically underrepresented groups who often face barriers to accessing higher education.

On top of that, various research findings highlight just how important focusing on skills will become. For instance, LinkedIn found a 25% change in skill sets for jobs from 2015–2022 and projected this will double by 2027. McKinsey recently identified over 50 foundational skills for the future of work and discovered that many of them are not necessarily linked to education. The message is clear: Employers need to shift emphasis from tasks to skills in their recruitment efforts.

Bringing it all together, I think it is clear that we all need to reevaluate how we write job descriptions. While the best solution will vary depending on the needs of different employers, there are some key points to consider.

Beyond working to make job descriptions inclusive, we need to make them more interesting and informative for prospective candidates. For instance, make them specific to your organization and to the particular role in question. Let them reflect your identity and values as an employer.

Perhaps you could also look into using new formats such as job scorecards. In addition, focus on skills where these are what the role really needs, and communicate what the employee’s wider organizational role would be. These changes will likely make your job descriptions more engaging for job seekers and attract applications from candidates who are genuinely enthusiastic about the role.

JOIN US IN THE COMMENTS: In your organization, are you already seeing an increase in non-job activities and employees working beyond their specified job titles? Have you changed the way you write job descriptions in response to this? We encourage you to share any thoughts or experiences that build on the ideas in today’s article.