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Did you know that your employees’ low productivity and disengagement might be because of a poor job description you wrote? Having a centralized job description library is not optional.
Most companies don’t take job descriptions seriously. They see JDs as a “nice to have”. And this is why you find job descriptions scattered everywhere across Google Drive, emails, outdated files, and Excel.
But this approach of not having a central location for your job description management process leads to several hidden costs that negatively impact your recruitment process, employee engagement, retention, employer branding, and more.
In this guide, I’ll help you understand the hidden costs of not having a centralized job description library. And share how having this job repository software prevents all those costs.
Let’s dive in:
1. Not Having a Centralized Job Description Library Leads to a Disorganized Job Description Management Process
The absence of a centralized job description library creates different challenges during the JD creation process. Because all your JD documents get scattered everywhere, from Word documents, emails, and the organization’s shared Drive.
So this lack of a central JD repository software leads to issues such as:
- Having a messy JD collaboration workflow process because there’s no defined working process. Anyone can just approve what they want.
- Creating a long process to write and publish even a short JD document. Because time gets wasted starting to write the JD from scratch, since you don’t have access to a similar version you wrote before.
- Using outdated details to write your job description because you can’t access the current information.
- Poor standardization across your job descriptions because you don’t already have pre-defined templates.
- Having a chaotic JD revision since you don’t even know which version you should edit, and who should edit which section.
In the long run, all the above issues negatively affect your entire hiring process.
2. Without a Centralized Job Description Library Causes An Inefficient Recruitment Process
A good JD is the foundation of a smooth hiring process. And having a centralized job description library helps create a good JD by ensuring your JD process is in one place.
But with a lack of JD repository software, your JDs lack an efficient central creation place. Thus leading to inefficient and prolonged recruitment cycles in these ways;
- Prolongs the Creation of a Poor JD: Without proper JD standardization, your JD writing team has to guess most items of a job description. And this leads to the production of a JD with conflicting responsibility details, a misaligned pay structure, and vague benefits descriptions.
- Increased Time-to-Hire: The poor JD then leads to a long process in getting any qualified candidates. Because most time gets spent clarifying the JD information to candidates.
- Leads to an Expensive Hiring Process: If you’re not hiring qualified talent with your internal recruiters, chances are you’ll reach out to recruitment agencies. This adds to your recruitment expenses.
Not forgetting that your organization will continue to lose money daily due to the many open roles.
3. Leads to an Increase in Employee Disengagement and Turnover
A good job description outlines the expectations of the employer by defining the job responsibilities and duties. But with a poor JD, misaligned expectations arise from both the employer and the employee.
Image Source: Unsplash
For instance, a bad JD might mislead candidates in some of these ways, thus leading to employee disengagement:
- Having Conflicting Role Responsibilities: Once the candidates start working and realize that the actual duties differ from the duties in the JD document, their motivation to work reduces gradually.
- Confusing Benefits: Probably in your JD, you wrote that candidates will get benefits such as health insurance and monthly training opportunities. Then once they start working, they realize that such benefits aren’t provided.
- Pay Inequities: A vague job description doesn’t align with market-driven pay for that role. And once a candidate starts their job, they realize the duties aren’t worth the pay. So they feel cheated.
And because the employee feels cheated, their productivity slows down. And they immediately start planning their exit from your organization.
4. A Poor Performance Management Evaluation Process
Job descriptions and performance management are two interlinked factors. A good job description outlines the daily responsibilities of the candidate. And performance management checks how well the employee has performed those responsibilities.
But due to a lack of JD repository software, your team struggles to write a JD that clearly outlines responsibilities.
So with the poor JD, the performance management evaluation process becomes difficult and inefficient. For instance, it becomes:
- Challenging to Create Measurable Goals: The lack of detailed job responsibilities makes it hard for both the employee and manager to set measurable performance goals. So the manager sets misaligned goals for the employees’ duties.
- Difficulty in Identifying Skills Gaps: With a vague JD, there’s no way for the manager to identify any extra training the employee needs or might need in the future.
- Challenging to Justify Decisions: Any organizational decision related to a worker’s performance needs a good justification. Be it a pay rise, promotion, or even termination. But with a mismatch between the JD and what the candidate is doing, it becomes difficult to justify any decision.
5. Leads to Unsuccessful Employee Training and Development Programs
An effective JD pinpoints workers’ training needs by identifying skill gaps and setting employee performance expectations. So by comparing your staff’s current skills with those required for their work, you build targeted training to fill gaps.
But without a centralized job description library to help you write a good job description that includes the crucial skills, you produce a poor job description. This problem then leads to developing training and development programs that are misaligned with actual skill needs. Thus leading to wasted time and resources. Here’s how:
- Your L&D Team Creates a One-Size-Fits-All Employee Training: Due to a lack of thorough position definitions, you create broad development programs that don’t aim to address a particular skill gap issue. So employees leave without gaining any knowledge. And you end up wasting organization resources.
- Difficulty Prioritizing Investment-Worthy Training: Since your L&D teams don’t understand which skills are crucial and nice-to-have for your current organization’s needs, all skills end up looking important to them. And so they don’t invest heavily in the important skills.
- Challenges Evaluating Training Success: Because the L&D team doesn’t know what success looks like for each role to have an impact on business success, they struggle to understand if the training had any value.
In the long run, you’ll waste resources. And employees will also get discouraged because they don’t see any career growth for themselves.
6. A Rise in a Poor Employer Brand
Failure to write an effective JD leads to a poor role definition that negatively shapes your candidates’ perception of your organization.
This poor candidate experience negatively shapes your employer brand in some of these ways:
- Getting negative ratings on employer review sites such as Glassdoor: Once candidates realize that what’s written in the job description differs from the actual requirements, they will publicly share their negative experiences. This makes other qualified candidates doubt applying to your job openings.
- High employee turnover: If a lot of employees are leaving your organization, it scares off the current employees. Because they don’t know if they’ll also last long. And in your exit interviews, chances are high that you’ll end up finding that the employees are leaving because the job responsibilities are different from the actual JD expectations.
- Challenges attracting qualified candidates: Serious candidates usually research an organization thoroughly before deciding to apply for a job opening. So when they find negative reviews about your organization and your job descriptions, they remove you from their list of preferred employers.
7. Difficulties Creating a Strategic Workforce Planning Roadmap
Crafting effective job descriptions ensures a good understanding of the workforce needs of your organization. The job description provides a proper structure that helps any organizational succession planning and workforce planning process.
But with a bad job description process with no central JD creation location, you can’t pinpoint the current and future needs of your organization.
Here’s how:
- Lack of a Good Overview of your Workers: Without a job description repository software, it becomes challenging to know what responsibilities and skills are across each role in your departments. You might even find your organization hiring for a role that isn’t needed.
- Poor Workforce Planning: The above lack of understanding of your present human capital makes it difficult to forecast the future organizational human capital needs.
- Poor Succession Planning: Due to a lack of understanding of your human capital’s performance, it becomes difficult to identify important roles and prepare the right employees to fill those roles in the future. So this leads to future leadership gaps in your organization
8. Not Having a Centralized Job Description Library Increases in Compliance Risks
The lack of a centralized job description library introduces legal and compliance risks for your organization.
These risks arise because of different issues, such as writing a job ad with discriminatory language. And creating JDs that don’t adhere to different employment compliance laws. And these risks creep into your job ads without even noticing because a disorganized JD writing process builds an environment where JD compliance becomes challenging to maintain. This environment leads to:
- Having outdated JDs: Without a single source of truth for your JDs, your JDs don’t have a central creation location. And because of this, editing becomes a challenge. So you find your organization having outdated JDs that don’t reflect any recent employment laws.
- Lack of JD Standardization: A lack of a job description repository software means you’ll end up having JDs with conflicting information. For instance, you might find your JDs having conflicting pay details that might lead to a lawsuit once that issue reaches the court.
- Having a poor JD collaboration Process: A disorganized JD writing process increases compliance risks because there’s no set person to even check for any legal risks in the JD. So, anyone just approves the JD for publishing.
Plus, storing JDs is important when you’re faced with a lawsuit. But if you haven’t properly stored your job descriptions, it becomes a challenge to defend your organization in an employment-related court case.
9. A Reduction in Employee Internal Mobility
Internal mobility is crucial for any organization’s growth. It reduces hiring costs, leads to high employee engagement and retention. A LinkedIn report revealed that 94% of workers say they would stay longer in an organization that invests in their career growth. But with a poor JD process producing bad job descriptions, employees struggle to understand clear career paths or identify the requirements and steps for internal promotions. This is because:
- Due to a lack of standardized JDs, current staff struggle to understand the crucial job needs beyond their current duties. Because your JDs just have generic information.
- There’s compensation and level vagueness. Similar open roles have different salary levels. And sometimes even a work-demanding role has a lower pay band than an easy one. So employees become confused about how they can move to the next level in your organization.
Eventually, qualified employees leave for better-paying external opportunities.
10. Leads to a Misaligned Compensation Process
Having a centralized job description library helps create a standardization process to ensure there are no conflicting JD details. But the lack of a central JD repository software increases the chances of producing a JD with conflicting information for important elements, such as compensation structure.
Here’s how:
- Creates Job Title Inconsistencies among Departments: The lack of JD standardization leads to conflicting definitions for the same roles in your organization’s departments. This leads to the same roles getting placed in different compensation bands despite being the same. And if employees end up discovering this, pay equity issues arise in your organization.
- Challenges Benchmarking against Market Data: With a good JD, it’s easy to compare the job opening salary band against third-party compensation data, such as salary surveys. But with a bad JD, you won’t know what you’re benchmarking against because your JD doesn’t have the right role definition. And remember that 61% of applicants consider salary as an important factor in JDs.
So, if your job description has a salary range that’s below the market’s rate for that title, qualified candidates who know their value won’t apply.
The Strategic Way a Centralized Job Description Library Prevents The Above Costs
Simply put, a centralized job description library simplifies your job description management process. So you write effective job descriptions that serve as the foundation of your recruitment process.
Here’s how:
- Provides a Centralized JD Storage
A centralized JD library offers a location to store your job descriptions. This way, your job descriptions aren’t scattered everywhere. Your HR team can access, update, edit, and maintain all the JDs in one place. So it becomes easier to create the job description. And check that the JD has standardized formats, content guidelines, language, and best practices.
- Simplifies the JD Collaboration Workflow Process
The lack of a centralized location for creating job descriptions leads to a chaotic JD collaboration process. Because there’s no proper workflow on who’s supposed to edit, write, and approve different sections of a job description.
So the JD creation, submission, and approval processes need simplified management so that each job ad is initiated, created, edited/modified, and approved on time.
For instance, at Ongig, we offer a centralized cloud-based job library. This solution saves your team time when creating new postings and streamlines your job description workflow. Here’s how:
- Simplifies Role-Based Access Control
Ongig makes it easy for all your JD writing team members to have specific permissions. For instance, an HR manager might have access to write, edit, and modify drafts. While the talent acquisition specialist might manage style guides. And the HR head might have final JD approval.
- Easy User Management Workflow
With Ongig software, it’s easy to create an “Administrator” control to coordinate user accounts. So, everyone gets to perform only their specific work. And you won’t find instances of someone editing or approving work they aren’t supposed to touch.
Also, easily add new users to the system without challenges. For instance, if you want inputs from a staff member working in a similar position you’re recruiting for in the organization. With user administrator control, you easily add them to the workflow to work on the sections where their input is important.
TIP: Listen to this episode below of the JD Fix Podcast, where our host Heather Fenty, our director of sales and content marketing, breaks down the challenges of having scattered JDs. And shares how a job repository software helps your team speed up the JD management process in one place.
- Makes it Easy to Search and Filter Job Descriptions
The search and filter functionalities in a centralized job description library help to locate departments, job titles, or required skills by entering relevant keywords. Plus, it makes it easy to compare JDs, identify trends, and examine the requirements for various positions. So you save time and effort from manually sifting through scattered JD documents.
For instance, Ongig’s centralized cloud-based job library offers real-time search and filter options to find any job description you want quickly.
- Simplifies Job Description Version Control
JDs sometimes require rewriting because of any changes in the specific position, industry, or business decisions. But if the JDs don’t have a central location, you can’t even locate or know the JD version document to modify.
A centralized job description library provides simplified version control, so every JD creation and revision process gets documented.
This way, everyone can track the history of the JD modification process, the person who made the edits, the date, and the time the JD edits got modified.
- Enhances JD Standardization
Having no central JD location means you’ll start to write your JD from scratch each time you have an open position. But with a centralized JD location, you easily use a relevant template from your JD repository tool and modify it to fit the open position requirements. The templates also enhance consistency in messaging, formatting, and branding across various positions in the organization. This consistency makes your job ads more professional, hence improving your employer brand.
- Simplifies Compliance with Legal Requirements
A centralized job description library simplifies the complex process of legal compliance in different ways, such as:
- Optimizing JD language: You can easily scan and highlight any discriminatory language that might get you on the wrong side of employment law. Plus, the provision of templates ensures you don’t have to worry if you’ve included all required compliant JD sections, such as EEO statements.
- Providing Automated Employment Laws Updates: A centralized JD library makes it easy to keep up to date with updates in labor laws and regulations. So, the tool automatically updates its content guidelines. And provides templates to help with the compliance changes.
FAQs on Hidden Costs of Not Having a Centralized Job Description Library
What are the main hidden costs of not having a centralized job description library?
The main hidden cost that occurs because of the lack of a centralized job description library is a poor job description management process. And a poor job description creation process leads to more other costs, such as finding it difficult to hire and retain qualified candidates.
What are the signs my organization is experiencing these hidden costs?
Having different issues, such as candidates complaining about role mismatches, poor pay, and even your HR team taking a long time to write and publish a job description.
What are the main advantages of investing in a centralized job description library?
A centralized job description library simplifies your job description management process. And with a good job description, it becomes easy to have a smooth recruitment process because you’ve set the foundation for getting qualified candidates.
Why I Wrote This
A centralized job description library is the foundation of an efficient recruitment process. You manage the whole process in a central place, thus ensuring you create efficient and standardized job descriptions.
So if you want help organizing your job descriptions for a smooth hiring process, that’s exactly what we do at Ongig. We’d be happy to show you how it works.
