What a good job brief actually contains

A job description describes a person; a brief describes a problem

The description lists what someone should already have: years, tools, titles. It is written to filter, and it filters on the things that are easiest to measure rather than the things that matter.

A brief starts from the other end. What is not happening today that needs to happen? What will this person own in their first six months? Answer those and the profile narrows itself, usually further than the description would have.

The four things worth writing down

Everything else is detail. If a brief has these, a recruiter can go to market with it; if it does not, they are guessing.

• The outcome: what changes because this person joined
• The first project: something concrete they would pick up in week two
• The constraints: budget, location, clearance, seniority, anything non-negotiable
• The trade-off: if you could only have depth or breadth, which one

Say what is hard about the job

Every role has something awkward in it: legacy nobody wants to touch, a stakeholder who is difficult, a team that has lost people. Leaving it out does not hide it, it just moves the discovery to the third interview, or worse, to month two.

Candidates who are worth hiring are not put off by a real problem. They are put off by finding out you were not straight with them.

Write it together, once

Thirty minutes with the hiring manager and whoever will do the interviewing, at the start, is the highest-return half hour in the whole process. It is also where most searches that later stall could have been saved.