Job Description

What a job description should include

A complete JD is longer and more precise than a job ad. A practical standard set of fields:

• Job title, code and job family, matching your job architecture.
• Department, location and reporting line, including roles that report into this one.
• FLSA classification: exempt or non-exempt.
• Job summary: two or three sentences on why the role exists.
• Essential functions: the core duties, ideally with an approximate share of time for each.
• Marginal functions: tasks the person sometimes does that could be reassigned.
• Required qualifications: skills, licenses, certifications and experience truly needed on day one.
• Preferred qualifications, kept clearly separate.
• Physical requirements and working conditions: lifting limits, standing, noise, shift patterns, travel.
• Pay grade or range and the date the JD was last reviewed.

Use our job description template as a starting point; it includes each of these fields in a format that HR, compensation and recruiting can all work from.

Job description vs job posting

These two get confused more than any other pair of recruiting documents. The job description is internal, stable and complete. The job posting is external, persuasive and short. The JD tells a compensation analyst how to grade the role and tells an employment lawyer what the essential functions are. The posting tells a candidate scrolling on a phone why they should apply.

In practice, copying the full JD into a job board is one of the most common reasons ads underperform. Candidates do not want to read 14 bullet points about cross-functional collaboration. Pull the summary, the top four or five duties, the true must-haves, pay, schedule and benefits into the posting, and keep the rest internal.

A third document sometimes sits alongside both: the job specification, which focuses only on the person (skills, qualifications, traits) rather than the work.

Where job descriptions come from

Good JDs come out of job analysis: observing the work, interviewing incumbents and supervisors, and checking what top performers actually do. Bad JDs come from copying last year's version or a similar posting online.

For high-volume roles, spend real time on this once. Sit with three or four agents in a contact center, or walk a shift with pickers in a warehouse. You will often find the real job differs from the paper version. A customer service JD might list email support, while 90 percent of the actual work is phone calls with a strict average handle time. That gap matters for selection, training and turnover. For more on writing persuasive copy from the JD, see our guide to crafting effective job descriptions.

Legal and compliance points

In the US, job descriptions carry legal weight in a few specific ways:

• ADA: the Americans with Disabilities Act says that if an employer has prepared a written job description before advertising or interviewing for a job, that description is considered evidence of the essential functions. That makes the essential functions list important when evaluating reasonable accommodation requests.
• FLSA: exempt status depends on salary level and actual duties, not the title. A JD that labels a role exempt does not make it exempt if the duties do not meet the test.
• Title VII and disparate impact: qualifications that screen out protected groups at higher rates, such as unnecessary degree requirements or strength tests not tied to the job, must be job-related and consistent with business necessity.
• Physical requirements: state them as the function (lift and carry 40-pound boxes several times an hour) rather than as a trait of the person.

Rules vary by state, and pay transparency laws in several states apply to postings rather than internal JDs. Review with counsel when in doubt.

Common mistakes

• Requirement inflation. Asking for a bachelor's degree and three years of experience for an entry-level role. It shrinks your pool and can create legal exposure without improving quality.
• Vague duties. Phrases like supports the team or other duties as assigned tell nobody what the job is. Keep the catch-all line, but make the main duties concrete.
• Out-of-date content. A JD that has not been reviewed in three years usually describes a different job. Review high-volume JDs at least annually.
• Mixing must-haves and nice-to-haves. Recruiters screen against whatever is listed. If a nice-to-have is in the required list, good candidates get rejected.
• No measurable outcomes. The best JDs state what success looks like after six or twelve months, which also feeds directly into interview scorecards.

How JDs support the rest of hiring

A well-built JD does more than satisfy compliance. It defines the competencies your interview questions should test, the pass criteria for screening, the knockout questions in your application, and the learning objectives for new-hire training. When a hiring manager and recruiter disagree about a candidate, the JD is the reference point. For organizations hiring at scale, keeping a single approved JD per role across all sites removes a surprising amount of inconsistency in who gets hired.