The job description no one reads – and what it should say instead
A job description that only lists tasks does not describe a post. It describes an expectation placed on a person who does not exist.
In a building control office, a job description dates back to 2019. Under “main duties” stands a single sentence: “Assisting with the processing of planning applications.” The post holder now independently examines and decides applications under the simplified procedure, liaises with technical departments on deviations from the local development plan, and represents the department during public advice sessions. None of this appears in the document. Anyone who needed to assess the post from the outside, for pay grading, for a replacement recruitment, for briefing a cover, would find none of the answers they needed.
This is not an isolated case, and it is not simply a matter of neglect that an annual reminder email could fix. The real problem lies in the wording itself: “assisting with” says nothing about what the person actually does, how much discretion they have, or what proportion of their time the task takes up. A description like this cannot sensibly be updated, because from the outset it was too vague to capture anything concrete. You can only update what already described something in the first place.
Why listing tasks is not the same as describing them
A job description that only lists tasks does not describe a post. It describes an expectation placed on a person who does not exist. It describes an abstract function rather than a concrete activity, and that is exactly the difference between a document that holds up and one that is already outdated the day it is signed. “Supporting casework” or “contributing to projects” are catch-all phrases under which almost any activity can be filed. That may tick a formal box, but it cannot justify a pay grade, cannot be used to derive a person specification for recruitment, and cannot tell a new colleague what is expected of her on day one.
The alternative does not require more effort. It requires a different habit when writing: describing the actual action performed instead of the function.
The one change that matters: from task list to description
The difference is clearest in direct comparison:
Before: “Assisting with the processing of planning applications.”
After: “Independent examination and determination of planning applications under the simplified procedure; liaison with technical departments on deviations from the local development plan; advising applicants during the open consultation hours.”
The second sentence is no longer, but it replaces a catch-all term with three concrete actions: examine and determine, liaise, advise. Each can be assigned a time proportion, each shows how much independent judgement is involved, and each can be checked against the post holder’s actual working day. The underlying rule fits in one line: wherever “assisting”, “supporting” or “contributing to” appears, the real information is missing. These words describe a relationship to the task, not the task itself.
This applies to any job description, regardless of profession or pay grade. There is no need to rewrite an entire description to feel the difference. It is enough to flag every sentence containing one of these three catch-all terms and replace it with the actual activity. The same applies where many comparable posts are grouped into a single function description to limit the maintenance effort: a function description covering ten similar posts does not become more precise by being more general. It merely needs to capture the actual activity of the group rather than of a single person, while staying just as concrete in its wording.
What depends on this
This one change carries more weight than its brevity suggests.
For pay grading, the concrete activity, not the abstract function, determines which pay grade a post belongs to. A vague formulation is hard to defend in a grading appeal, because it provides no basis for comparison against the collective agreement’s job evaluation criteria. Anyone who relies on catch-all terms shifts the real work of justification into the dispute itself, instead of settling it cleanly beforehand.
For recruitment, the concrete description determines whether a person specification is any use at all. Advertising “contributing to digitalisation” attracts applications for a post that does not exist in that form, and the actual requirements then have to be clarified in the interview rather than checked against beforehand.
For induction, the concrete description is the difference between a new colleague who knows on day one what she is being measured against, and one who has to work that answer out for herself over months, usually by watching and asking rather than from a document that could have saved her that time.
For succession planning, the concrete description is the only basis on which it is possible to establish which development steps a potential successor would still need to go through. A vague function description leaves that question open until the post is already vacant, and by then there is no time left to answer it.
What to do now
Rewriting a job description looks like more effort than it actually is, as long as it is treated as one large project covering a whole department at once. It becomes smaller once reduced to the one change described here: take a job description older than three years, flag every sentence containing “assisting”, “supporting” or “contributing to”, and replace it with the actual action performed. Anyone who works through this for a single post quickly notices how many decisions, from pay grading through recruitment to succession planning, have so far rested on a document that never described the actual work. The next case can then be handled with the same approach, and at some point the whole department is done, without it ever having felt like a project.