Forget Job Titles—Here’s How to Write Job Descriptions That Find the Right Talent

People put a lot of stock into job titles, but are they really the most effective at outlining what the job is actually about? What about attracting the right candidates to the position?

A lot of the time, a job posting will have a vague set of minimum qualifications, key requirements, and whatever cringeworthy spin businesses have on their company culture or work environment. What they’ll miss is what they’ll need to be successful in the role. And that leaves everyone not just confused, but ill-equipped to succeed. If you want top talent, you need a well-written job description that can provide candidates with a clear, high-level overview of what they’re applying for.

Moving from position description to role clarification

When you’re applying for a role, you’ll usually be met with a position description. It’ll include job responsibilities and preferred qualifications like a bachelor’s degree or years of experience, which are all tied to the job title. But what they don’t include is often the most important part to know: What is the impact of the position?

This is what role clarification is: a focus not just on the basic responsibilities and description of the role, but the required capabilities, too.

For job seekers, it’s nice to know exactly how the role you’re applying for actually aligns with the organization’s mission and strategy from the get-go. Not only do job seekers get a clear idea of what they’re applying for, but it also means you’re more likely to attract qualified candidates for the role.

For employees and their managers, it’s about setting clear expectations. Expectations of what they’re meant to be doing to be successful in the role, how they’re contributing value to the organization, and what potential career pathways are open to them.

For HR, it creates an overview of the roles within the workforce. You can see what capabilities you already have and what capabilities you need to develop. And that means you know what roles to recruit for.

The short of it: An effective job description focuses on a role’s strategic outcomes, not just job duties.

Skills-based, task-based, or capability-based?

If you’re wondering what makes a good job description fall into the category of role clarification over simple position description, look no further than capabilities. These are the essential functions of a job role, not just a list of key responsibilities, must-have skills, or even nice-to-have skills.

The reason for this is twofold.

1. Skills are transient and change quickly over time. The half-life of a skill is down to about two years with all the advancements in technology of late (hello, AI) and that means employees need to constantly re- or upskill if they want to stay relevant in the job market.
2. Reducing job descriptions to tasks and duties still doesn’t show the significance of the position. It can tell job applicants what day-to-day activities they’ll have to do, but without required proficiency levels in specific capabilities, there are no set expectations on how they should do those things. A “search engine optimization” task could mean you add specific keywords into written copy, or it could mean you’re knee-deep in analytics and keyword generation. These drive different strategic value to the business, and if your job descriptions aren’t clear on that, how can you get the best candidates?

This is all to say: Capabilities are the way. Unlike skills, they don’t get old, stagnate, or become completely irrelevant. Capabilities encompass skills (as well as the tools, processes, knowledge, and behaviors that deliver strategic outcomes) so while it drives goals, the skills or required knowledge may shift over time.

If you’re a bit confused, look at it this way: Once upon a time, brands sold their goods by just going out on the street and harking their wares. Then more brands joined in, and it was hard to get noticed over the loud noise of the advertising scene. So, brands had salespeople go door to door. But then other brands had their own salespeople doing the same thing, so salespeople got creative. They got a celebrity endorsement, or a billboard. They made website ads and built social media campaigns.

The point is that sales people are still driving their companies’ goals of getting sales, they’ve just had to pivot the how as technology, processes, and standards changed.

How to write a capability-based job description

At Acorn, we’re focused on giving employees a capability-based experience. We’re using Capabilities to streamline and inform decision-making from top to bottom, starting with the humble job description.

We know first-hand the pain of writing job descriptions that attract the right fit, so we built a tool to make it easier. Our Job Description Assistant takes any job title and builds out a role description complete with core capabilities, responsibilities, and even a company bio. Oh, and that’s in the space of a few minutes, too.

You’ll notice that it’s not just listing out capabilities, though. Capabilities are what makes the job role, but they’re not the entire job description.

Step 1: Start with a job purpose statement

This is essentially explaining why the job exists in the first place. What’s the purpose, what’s the value, and how does it contribute to organizational success?

The main reason you need to know this? Capabilities are first and foremost derived from your business strategy (they’re about how organizational goals are met, after all). This tells people what the role’s impact is on the organization. You can derive job titles from here.

The reason we use a purpose statement to inform job titles and not the other way around is that the impact of the role is more likely to attract the right talent. Job titles alone can confuse candidates if they’re not specific or easily recognizable within your industry. At Acorn, we had to change a job title on a posting because we weren’t getting the right applicants—the job title just wasn’t conveying what the job was all about to job seekers. If your job statement is clear, though, employees and candidates know at a glance what the job will involve.

It’s a bit like a capability in that sense. If the capability name isn’t a high-level overview of what it is, then it stops being a capability and starts being a creative writing project. Plus, if you’re trying to set expectations for what the job is about, muddying the waters for employees and potential candidates with ambiguous terms or creatively named job titles isn’t going to make it easier.

So have a good job title with a clear job purpose statement to go with it, and you’ve already got a good foundation to select capabilities from.

Step 2: Define key capabilities, not key tasks

What are the capabilities that are needed to succeed in the role? Usually, we recommend between two and five capabilities for each job role. At Acorn, we use five, with a sixth one for our leadership roles. If you’re struggling to think of some relevant capabilities (because that’s a lot of capabilities for a lot of different roles), we have a Capability Library of over 1600 capabilities you can choose from and use as you need.

Say you’re making a job description for a Customer Success Manager. Their capabilities might be:

1. Client relationship management: An ability to build strong client partnerships by understanding customer needs, providing tailored solutions, and maintaining ongoing engagement.
2. Problem-solving and critical thinking: Using data and customer feedback to anticipate challenges, recommend solutions, and drive continuous improvement.
3. Communication and influence: Engaging stakeholders through clear, persuasive communication and active listening.
4. Technology and data literacy: Proficient in CRM tools, data analysis, and reporting to track customer engagement and success metrics.
5. Collaboration and cross-functional alignment: Working effectively with sales, marketing, and product teams to improve customer experience.

Then each capability needs an assigned competency level, which is where you can get crafty with job levels. These should range from a foundational or emerging level to an advanced level. At Acorn, we have five levels:

1. Foundational 
2. Developing 
3. Proficient
4. Advanced 
5. Expert. 

Most of our capabilities require a “proficient” level of competence. The idea is that these capabilities—or more specifically, their competencies—provide a clear baseline for what it looks like to be performing a job role well. During the recruitment process, this helps narrow the applicant pool down to the ideal candidate. Even better, Capabilities gives you a view of the capabilities present in your workforce, which means you might just find that perfect candidate internally. That means ramp time is shortened by putting the right person in the right job, and they can smoothly step into the role.

Because sure, a candidate may have experience working with other teams before, but that could be under a supervisor’s guidance, meaning they’re likely at a foundational level of proficiency. Depending on how quickly you need a new role to ramp, you might only be looking for people meeting developing proficiency and above. You can track this in two ways:

1. When publishing job ads, include capability assessments in screening questions. Candidates can complete self-assessments of their capabilities so  hiring managers can identify right talent.
2. If the employee is coming from another capability-led organization, they may have something we like to call a “capability passport”. It’s a handy record of employee’s historical and current capabilities, development needs, and strengths, so you know exactly what kind of development new hires will need.

And in the long term, those competency levels become the basis of your performance review process. A new hire starts with that developing level, but after six months of development in the role they may improve their level of competency. You’ll know that because competencies are tied to behavioral anchors to evaluate against in capability assessments. If you use Capabilities to assess hires when they onboard, you have a baseline of their starting point. Then we run regular assessments to track their performance over time. We do them every 6 weeks.

Step 3: Outline key responsibilities (linked to capabilities)

Now you can get into the responsibilities of the role. These aren’t pulled from thin air; they’re pulled from the role’s assigned capabilities. Make sure you list them under their relevant capabilities, to provide context to the task.

Under “Technology and data literacy”, you might have:

• Leverage data analytics to identify customer trends and proactively address retention risks.

And under “Collaboration and cross-functional alignment” you might have:

• Facilitate collaboration between customer support and product teams to address feedback effectively.

The point is that the responsibilities listed in a job description shouldn’t just be a set of disconnected tasks. They should all have a point and an impact, and that comes from role-based capabilities.

Step 4: Define success metrics

What does success look like in the role? These should be derived from capabilities (obviously) because they’re directly linked to competency levels and behavioral anchors. Within our Capabilities platform, each competency level has a written description listing:

1. What employees at this level are able to do
2. Behavioral requirements to meet this level.

These help employees and managers track performance and provide measurable metrics when it comes back around to evaluation time. Your customer success manager might need a customer retention rate above 90% to be proficient, but because they’re only meeting 80% retention, they’re marked at the developing level. You know, then, to provide learning tied to that development area. 

The cost of poorly written job descriptions

Let’s be real, there’s probably been a time when you’ve turned up to your first day of a new job only to be completely bewildered by what was expected of you. Sure, if your job description said “manage company social media” then you know you’re managing the company’s online presence. But that could simply be posting about events you’re running, or a more strategic push to build brand awareness or conversions. If job seekers don’t know what they’re applying for, they might be put off—or you’ll have to sift through a lot of applications that aren’t a good fit at all.

This also means you as a company may have way more legwork to do in the onboarding phase in terms of training being delivered. And a mountain of learning content can be daunting and overwhelming for new hires. When up to 20% of new hire turnover happens within the first 45 days, you don’t want that extra barrier. especially given the resources, time, and money that went into the recruiting process in the first place.

Plus, a lack of clear expectations tends to have flow-on effects in things like performance reviews and career progression. If your manager doesn’t know what you’re meant to be doing, you probably don’t know either. Your manager certainly can’t evaluate you fairly. Plus, they won’t know what your potential is in terms of career growth and mobility. And if HR doesn’t know either of those things, then they’ve got no visibility of the workforce to identify gaps or development areas.

Without capabilities, performance conversations are just subjective vibes-based exercises. And that means that if employees do need help in certain areas, they have no way of getting the learning to help them—because no one knows they need that learning to begin with.

Key takeaways

Writing a job description is less about describing the job and more about defining the strategic value. Job responsibilities and duties don’t really “define” a job role. They’re just a collection of job duties not linked to tangible performance metrics, KPIs, or strategy.

After all, strategic value is the purpose of the job, and if employees don’t understand the purpose of the job, then they don’t understand what the job is.

Start with capabilities. They’ll inform the rest of the job description, rather than creating a job description and tacking capabilities onto the end.