When it comes to recruiting new people into your business, or expanding someone’s role, or identifying where to add more resource into the business, it needn’t be that difficult.

Follow these 4 steps to start creating and defining roles within your business, and writing the necessary Position Description:

1. Ask yourself these questions first:

• What functions are being done poorly or not done at all?
• Where do I/other team members need help?
• Where do we need resources the most?
• Where do we have resource gaps?
• Where do we have bottlenecks?
• Do we have any internal people who could do the job/perform this function?
• What exactly do we need done?
• What is the purpose of the role?
• How does it fit in the organization overall?
• Who would the role report to?

2. Decide on your budget, and the timing
This is critical. When developing growth strategies and their required structure with my clients, the addition of more ‘heads’ is always accompanied by the related financial and sales planning.

You can ‘play with’ costs (eg: if we reduce general expenses by 5% we can employ a junior admin assistant), or you can ‘play with’ revenue (eg: if we can increase our sales by 5% a month within 3 months, we can employ a really experienced admin support person).

3. Decide on the level of experience you want/need

• Match the role to the budget (pay less, get less)
• Recruit experience (pay more, get more)
• Trade-off against time required to coach vs higher cost, but self-starter

4. Write the Position Description
This should be easy now you know:

• the purpose of the role
• who the role would report to
• what functions form part/all of that particular role
• the experience level required

Defining the role is just one step in our latest 12-Step People Management System, a new product which I’ll be telling you more about in our next e-news. It will give you all the detail you need for each of the 12 steps, including templates, examples and checklists.

Stumble it!