A position description is more than a job ad; it's the contract of clarity between you and a hire about what success looks like. Get it right, and you attract better candidates, onboard them faster, and have a fair basis for accountability.
Use the free templates below as a starting point so you don't reinvent the wheel for every role.
Why a Strong Position Description Matters
Most "bad hires" are hired against a fuzzy definition of the job. A clear PD does four things: it attracts the right candidates (and repels the wrong ones), it speeds up onboarding because expectations are written down, it gives you and the hire a shared yardstick for performance, and it makes delegation possible because the role's outcomes are explicit.
What to Include
A good position description should have:
- Role mission: one or two sentences on why the role exists and the outcome it owns.
- Key outcomes: three to five measurable results the role is accountable for (this is what separates a scorecard-style PD from a generic job post).
- Core responsibilities: the recurring work that produces those outcomes.
- Required competencies: the skills, traits, and experience the role demands. For scoping senior or fractional roles, see what a fractional executive does.
- Reporting and collaboration: who it reports to and works with.
Defining outcomes, not just activities, is the heart of effective hiring; it's the logic behind the scorecard approach in Who: The A Method for Hiring.
How to Use the Template
Open the template folder, find the role closest to what you're hiring, copy it, and tailor the mission, outcomes, and competencies to your business. Reuse the structure across roles so every job at your company is defined the same clear way.
What a Vague Position Description Costs You
A loose position description is not a small problem you fix later. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that a bad hire costs around 30% of that person's first-year salary once you add up recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and replacement. Most bad hires trace back to the same root: nobody wrote down what the role was accountable for, so the candidate and the company measured success against two different pictures. A clear position description makes those two pictures one.
Position Description vs Job Ad: What's the Difference?
A job ad sells the role to the market. A position description defines the role to the person doing it. The ad lists mission, perks, and a few headline duties to get people to apply. The position description is the internal document you and the hire both work from after they start, the one that says which outcomes they own and how you'll both know it's working. You can write the ad from the position description, but you can't run the role from the ad. When the two collapse into one vague paragraph, you get a hire who was sold one job and is held to another.
The Five Mistakes We See Most Often
Most position descriptions fail in predictable ways. They list activities instead of outcomes, so the role has tasks but no scoreboard. They run long on requirements and short on what the first 90 days should produce. They describe the person ("self-starter, team player") instead of the work. They get written once and never updated as the role grows. And they bury the outcome the role exists to deliver under a wall of generic duties. Fix those five and you have a description that holds.
How Long Should a Position Description Be?
Long enough to be clear, short enough to be read. One page is usually right: a role mission, three to five key outcomes, the core responsibilities behind them, the competencies required, and who the role works with. If it runs past two pages, you're probably describing someone's whole career instead of this role's job. If it's a single paragraph, you haven't defined enough to hold anyone accountable to it.
Get the Templates
Get the Position Description Templates (Google Drive folder). For a deeper hiring system, pair them with our summary of Who: The A Method for Hiring.