Profile : Crafting a detailed Job Specification

Now you have your G.O.A.L’s nailed for the role you’d like to hire, the good news is specifying the role just got a whole lot simpler.

In fact, there is only a little bit more quality thinking required before we hand over to AI to do the heavy lifting of creating us a draft job specification.

But first a warning:

Introducing the Will vs Skill Matrix

Your next ideal hire would have:

• High WILL - derived from alignment of their own values to your company culture and values, combined with their personal motivation to accomplish
• High SKILL - derived from the alignment of their education, skills and experience with the requirements of the role

For skill you’re ideally looking for demonstrable repeated capability to adapt and learn - the application of different skills in different companies, roles, industries, disciplines - those who have demonstrated their ability to perform regardless of environment are your “A-players”. Many organisations place a higher degree of emphasis on past and current skills than the ability of an individual to adapt and acquire new skills. It is our belief that this is a common mistake in the hiring process, made right at the beginning. You should ask yourself:

• Does my new team member REALLY need to have performed this role in our industry / business unit etc. - what bearing will this have on their ability to execute their skill in this new role and why do I think that?
• Would someone who has performed a similar role in different industries / business units etc.. bring diverse and alternative thinking that could IMPROVE out thinking?

For will, this is much harder to measure. Generally individuals are more likely to be motivated to perform when

• Their personal values are highly aligned with those of their immediate boss, team or company and execution of and payment for their work start to actually feel more like “nice to haves” vs. their core desire to do a great job
• When there is a perceived reward or delayed gratification “bigger” than the current reward structure - for example the belief that a promotion, long-term security or flexibility will happen by performing well in their current role for a period of time.

If you can understand a persons “why” this will give you a good indication of how strong their “will” is to do the work.

So, when creating the specification for the role, ask yourself is this particular skill essential or am I potentially eliminating candidates with higher “will” who could be better for us?

Creating your draft Job Specification using AI

• Fire up your favourite AI LLM (large language model) - at the time of writing the pace of change is rapid, and so advising on a specific model is likely to be quickly outdated. If you really want to know, right now we’re using ChatGPT 4o.
• Enter the following prompt with the following attachments

You are JobSpecBot, a world-class creator of job specifications.
I want you to create a job specification for me for a {Job Level) level {Job Title}.
The company they'll be working for is {Company Name}. Here is a description of the company :"{Company Description}".
The renumeration for the role is {salary}
The benefits package is {benefits}
Using the attached GOAL framework, job title and role level, please create me a job specification in the following format.
Heading.
Heading.
Heading.
Essential skills:
Optional skills:
Personal attributes:
Please use British English spellings. Please respond only with the job specification and nothing else.

You’ll get something that looks like this:

Your final tweaks

Now read it carefully. Does this really represent the specification of the role you’re hiring for.

You can make tweaks manually in Word or you can chat further to the LLM and ask it to try different things. Just chat like you would in plain English and ask it to do things like:

• Add more detail around x
• Remove y
• Make the part about z more detailed / more succinct
• Increase the length of experience required for {skill}

The possibilities are infinite and beyond the scope of this document, plenty of resources available on the internet to learn how to prompt and chat with a LLM better. But hopefully this gives you some idea.

Now you have a great job specification, it’s on to the next step - the job advert.