Write the Process Down Before You Hire Someone to Run It

By Trevor L Taylor

Writing a process down before you hire for it is the cheapest hour in the whole hiring effort. The act of writing forces you to decide what the job actually is, and that is the question most owners answer only after the new person is already sitting at a desk. A role that exists on paper is faster to train for and fairer to judge than a role that exists in one person’s memory.

Picture an owner in the first week with a new hire. The task gets explained on Monday, again on Tuesday, and a third time on Wednesday, a little differently each time, because it has never existed anywhere except in the owner’s head.

On Wednesday there is a choice. Keep explaining, which takes ten minutes and feels generous, or stop for two hours and write the work down properly. Almost everyone keeps explaining, because the ten minutes is visible and the two hours is not.

The cost of that choice arrives later and arrives quietly. The third explanation did not match the first, so the new person has learned a version of the job that nobody can check against anything. When the work later looks wrong, there is no agreed standard to point at, and the conversation becomes about the person rather than about the task.

What the owner bought with those ten minutes was the feeling of moving quickly. What the owner sold was every later week in which the same explaining has to happen again, to the same person or to the next one.

What writing a role down actually reveals

The useful part of the exercise is not the finished page. It is the discovery that happens while you write, when the job you imagined turns out to differ from the job that gets done.

Three things usually surface. There are steps you perform without noticing and would never have mentioned out loud. There are steps that drifted to you years ago and belong to someone else entirely. And there is judgment you cannot hand over at all, which is worth knowing before you promise a new person that the role is theirs to run.

Now and then the discovery is larger. The page comes out describing two different jobs that were only ever joined because one person happened to do both, which is often the real explanation for a hire that failed a year earlier.

The reason writing works better than talking is that writing makes you put the steps in order. Speech lets you move around the gaps, and a page does not, so the moment you try to number the steps you find the two you have never articulated.

The common objection is that showing somebody is faster than writing it down. That is true exactly once. Showing scales to one person on one day, and the page scales to everyone who holds the role afterwards, including the person who covers it for a fortnight while the first one is away.

A written role makes it more likely that the employer and the new person understand the same job. That matters most at the point of recruiting, because a person who reads an accurate account of the work can tell you whether they want it, and can be held to it later without anyone feeling ambushed.

Should you document a role before hiring for it?

Yes, in almost every case. Writing the role down first costs a couple of hours and changes what you look for, what you ask in an interview and how quickly the person becomes useful.

The order matters more than the format. A description written after the hire tends to describe whoever was hired, which quietly turns a role into a personality and makes the next hire for the same work almost impossible to brief.

Written first, the document does three jobs at once. It sets what you are advertising, it becomes the training plan in week one, and it gives both of you the same reference when you review the work. Hiring runs as a sequence of stages, from recruiting through onboarding and performance review.

It also works in the candidate’s favour, which matters more than it sounds. A person who reads the real duties and decides the role is not for them has saved you the most expensive outcome available, and they have done it for free.

It changes the interview most of all. Instead of asking a candidate to describe their strengths, you can walk them through the duties as written and ask how they would handle the third one, which produces an hour of specific conversation rather than an hour of impressions.

A written role also gives a small company something to look at on a schedule, which is what a fixed monthly operating rhythm is for.

What belongs in a written description of a job?

Four parts carry almost all of the weight. An accurate title, a short summary of the main responsibilities, the qualifications the work genuinely requires, and the duties as they are really performed.

Keep it to a page. A document that runs longer than that stops being read, and an unread page is worth no more than the explaining it was meant to replace.

Write the duties in the order they happen rather than in order of importance. A new person reads a list of tasks as an instruction for Monday morning, so a document that follows the actual shape of the week trains faster than one organised around how much each task matters.

Name the one outcome the role is answerable for, in a single line near the top. A list of duties tells a person what to do on Monday, and a named outcome tells them what to choose when two of those duties collide on Thursday.

Be strict about qualifications. The useful question is what the work genuinely requires on an ordinary day, not what an ideal candidate would happen to have, and every preference you promote into a requirement narrows the field for no return.

Then add the part most descriptions leave out, which is what the work looks like when it goes wrong. The exceptions are where a new person actually gets stuck, and two lines about the usual exception save more training time than another paragraph about the routine.

Work that lives only in one person's head has to be captured before it can become training material. Nobody can teach from a page that was never written, and the owner who carries the whole process privately is also the constraint on every future hire.

The hour you spend writing the job down is the hour the new person does not spend guessing.

Where writing it down first stops helping

The honest limit is that a document written before the hire is a draft, and treating it as settled is its own mistake. The person doing the work daily will see things you could not, and a role nobody is allowed to revise becomes a cage within a few months.

The limit has a second half. Writing the process down does nothing for a process that should not exist, and a page that faithfully records twelve steps where four would do has made a bad habit permanent and easier to pass on.

There is also a case where the whole exercise is not worth it. A task somebody will perform twice, or a temporary job lasting a fortnight, does not earn a document, and writing one anyway is the kind of tidiness that quietly replaces real work.

So the sequence that works is short. Write it before you advertise, train from it in the first week, then ask the person who now does the work what is wrong with it and change it with them.

That last step is the one that keeps the document alive. A role reviewed once with the person holding it stays accurate for a year, and a role never reviewed is usually wrong within a quarter without anybody saying so.

The effort also falls quickly. The first role takes two hours because you are inventing the format as well as the content, and the third takes forty minutes because you are only writing the content into a shape that already exists.

None of this depends on the size of the company. The owner who writes the work down before handing it over gets a faster start, a fairer standard and a role that can outlast whoever currently holds it, which is most of what separates a company from a group of people who are all very busy.

Trevor L Taylor is an investor, entrepreneur and lifelong athlete committed to supporting education.

Photos by Phil Hearing and Tanja Tepavac on Unsplash

Sources

Job Descriptions The Building Blocks of Organizations
Digitize Your Onboarding and Training With the Modern Learner in Mind
AgWorks A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring Onboarding and Retaining Farm Employees