How To Outline Clear Direction For Each Role On Your Team

It’s a commonly held goal to hire good employees and keep those great team members on board. If recruitment feels like a revolving door and retention efforts operate like a sieve, then re-evaluate your process and your foundation. 

What if you could focus on one tool to achieve the best recruitment and retention? 

Dave Mitchell thinks there is one—the job description. 

“The single most important tool to predict peak performance is a very well-developed job description,” he says. 

Mitchell founded The Leadership Difference after spending two decades in corporate HR management. While working with companies of all industries across the country, he developed metrics to measure peak performance.

“Go blow the dust off your job description book, or maybe first make sure you have job descriptions,” he says. “The next step is to update those job descriptions with necessary legal considerations. And third, make sure those job descriptions are good for the roles.” 

Mitchell says he defines “good” job descriptions as those that don’t just outline what the job does, but they explain the degree to which the employee is expected to do certain tasks. 

“If you provide that level of detail, you’ve got a recruiting tool, a training tool, a performance appraisal tool and an alignment tool. It makes one document serve multiple purposes and makes sure you have everything covered,” he says. 

For almost two decades, this magazine and its predecessors put out an annual salary survey to illuminate trends in compensation. In the past six years, base salaries for the two key roles tracked in the study—applicators/machine operators and sales agronomists—increased more than 30%. 

Having clear direction for every role in your organization can shore up the investment you make in your team.