Advertise Your Vacancy or Redesign the Job?

When to redesign a job and how to do it

Picture the scene.

One of your team has just resigned, and you face the whole advertise, recruit, and select cycle for that role.

Before you leap straight in, please stop and ask yourself some questions.

Do you need to fill that role, or does the job description need tweaking? Perhaps the last incumbent has taken on much more responsibility, or the position has changed.

Unless you want an exact match to the existing PD, it might be time to redesign the role or create a new one.

I’m sure you’ve all been in a situation where you’ve applied for a job that disappears halfway through the recruitment process.

Either the role is waiting for sign-off, gets canned before it’s filled, or there’s no budget for the advertised salary.

Amazingly, these things do happen. Just make sure they don’t occur on your watch.

Reasons Why You Might Need to Redesign the Job

Take the opportunity to think carefully about what you want the new incumbent of the role to do.

If you want any of the following to change, it might be time to redesign the role:

• Responsibilities of the role
• Reporting line
• Conditions of the role
• Benefits, for example, providing or removing a company vehicle
• Hours
• Location
• Seniority
• Job title
• Amount of direct reports
• Experience or qualifications required
• Bonding agreement
• The requirement to attend training or study for a qualification
• Working from home hours
• Secondary responsibilities such as being a first aider, fire warden, or tutor

How to Redesign a Role

Most large organizations will have a process for redesigning a role but if you don’t have one, here is how to go about it:

First Draft

Brainstorm what you want the new role to look like using the bullet points above.

Ask your team, consult department KPIs, and think about pain points and bottlenecks that cause team issues.

Check out the other position descriptions in the team to ensure consistency. It’s worth asking your team, including the person who has just resigned, to list everything they do.

That way, you’ll verify what everyone does to their position descriptions.

Take some time to consider the intricacies of the new role. It’s a lot of work to create a new job description, so you may as well get it right the first time.

Once you’ve brainstormed, create a new position description with the changes.

Give yourself a couple of days to re-visit your first draft. You will likely want to make a few changes. And you want to get it right before you put your draft out for feedback.

Sense Check, aka Feedback

To sense-check your first draft, get some input. Ask your line manager to review the position description to check that you haven’t missed anything.

Check out similar roles in other departments for parity around titles, responsibilities, and number of direct reports.

You won’t be able to check pay parity, but you could ask the payroll manager or your line manager to do that for you.

Also, check out similar roles on online job sites to ensure that the tasks, job title, salary, and benefits match.

If your job advertisement is out of step with other similar roles, you will have little luck getting applicants.

Get the new role and the salary signed off by whoever holds that authority.

It’s important that the salary matches the expectations and level of the new role, or you will struggle to fill it.

Finalize the new role

Inform everyone who needs to know about the new role. If your organization has a training matrix, add the new position and the required training.

Advise other departments such as payroll, IT, fleet, and uniforms of the new role. These departments need to organize IT access, vehicle and petrol allowances uniforms.

You’ll also need to add the role to online systems such as performance appraisal, LMS, and other HRIS systems.

Make sure soft copies of the new position description and employment contract are filed in the proper place.

There is nothing more frustrating than several versions of the same position description or several drafts with no clear understanding of which is the final document.

Summary

Considering if a role needs redesigning is a valuable exercise when someone resigns from a position with a sole incumbent.

It’s time well spent to keep your team productive and up-to-date.

You may also discover that some of the other roles in your team need redesigning, too.

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