5 Benefits of Collaborative Tools for Job Descriptions
Distributed workforces—where employees work in different locations—can make collaboration more difficult. But it doesn’t have to be when you leverage the benefits of collaborative tools.
Since the 2020 pandemic, 90% of organizations have used a version of a hybrid work model to continue operations offsite. Now, though many have returned to onsite work, two-fifths (40.9%) of workers are still either working remotely or in a hybrid work model.
You may know the obstacles of hybrid work firsthand. A lack of organic brainstorming. Communication barriers. Difficulty managing all stakeholder expectations. The list goes on.
But even distributed workforces need to rely on collaboration to stay competitive. Collaboration leads to better outcomes. With the right plan and the right people, a team can achieve more together than a single person. But how?
Collaboration, especially with the right collaborative tools, helps workers distribute workloads, share innovative ideas, and produce quality content faster. A great example of a task that requires and benefits from collaboration in HR is the infamous job description.
Often regarded as a document that needs sporadic and reactive updating when a vacant position opens, job descriptions hold a lot more potential than what people often harness from them. As they are the foundation of your talent programs (from recruitment to promotions), you should prioritize collaboration to improve your organization’s job descriptions.
What is a job description?
A job description is a complete record of the required skills, behaviors, responsibilities, education, knowledge areas, and other conditions an individual must meet to be successful in a specific position.
Job descriptions that include behavioral competencies can transform the usefulness of your document into the heart of effective talent programs. High-quality job descriptions can improve the quality of hires, streamline the hiring process, and improve the fairness and objectivity of hiring decisions.
Beyond the hiring process, job descriptions with competencies remain an important resource people leaders can use for succession planning, training and development, career pathing, and much more.
Job Description vs Job Posting
Job postings are what organizations advertise to give an overview of the requirements a candidate must meet to be considered for an open position. The job postings that organizations use for recruitment and hiring can be derived from their job descriptions. Think of a job posting as a slice of pie and a job description as the whole pie.
Collaboration vs Teamwork
Despite their similarities, collaboration and teamwork are not the same thing.
When it comes to collaboration vs teamwork, the key difference between the two terms is the authority structure or power distribution:
• Collaboration: Power or authority is usually distributed between the involved parties. They have a clear understanding that they cannot complete the project without everyone’s involvement. Those who collaborate have a common goal and can freely discuss ideas towards their main goal. There is no need for a leader (though there may be a project manager). By sharing the authority and burden of a project, collaborating parties can put their unique contributions towards its completion.
• Teamwork: Has a leader who is the final authority on all decisions. Teamwork often involves more delegation of tasks, as well. A team requires a detailed plan with clear guidelines and a leader to supervise related activities. The success of the project is heavily dependent on the leader’s own abilities, not those of their teammates.
How Collaboration Improves the Job Description Process
Job descriptions are one aspect of people leadership that require collaboration. According to data we collected from HRSG’s State of Job Descriptions 2020 survey, 36% of respondents rely on equal collaboration between an HR professional and a hiring manager for their job description creation process. While collaborating may seem like more work, when done correctly, it can help participants share the workload and get more time back in their day. Its benefits also outweigh any perceived inconveniences.
Better Quality Job Descriptions
Combining the unique strengths of all key stakeholders (such as an HR professional, hiring manager, employees in the role, and the executive team) can create more well-rounded and accurate job descriptions than what a single person could achieve.
Leveraging multiple perspectives of knowledgeable individuals means you can get clarity on what it takes to succeed in the role, what the job entails, and the type of work involved in the day-to-day duties. Communicating between parties also helps you better portray the job requirements within the description.
The end result?
Better quality job descriptions that you can use as a firm foundation for hiring and beyond.
Learning From Others
The collaboration process naturally facilitates learning. By communicating with others and considering their unique experiences and knowledge, employees learn from each other. This process helps you develop better insights, especially when contributors represent a diverse workforce and can help support diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging efforts.
Others can also help name what key skills and competencies job candidates need. For example, through collaboration, an HR manager consults the head of the IT department instead of only relying on IT job postings floating around the internet. The act of collaboration helps the HR manager learn the exact skills needed for an IT position and use that information to refine the job description.
Managers and executives within your organization have a vested interest in hiring the best candidate as quickly as possible. When working on collaborative job descriptions, involving these individuals is important. Draw on their expertise and reduce the amount of unreliable research you have to do on the internet.
Improved Efficiency
About 40% of respondents in McKinsey & Company’s The State of Organizations 2023 report stated that complex organizational structures and unclear roles and responsibilities cause inefficiency. But more than a third of respondents said efficiency was a top three organizational priority.
When working alone on a job description, you’ll have to devote a lot of your own resources (like time, energy, and focus), which you may not have a lot of because you balance other HR responsibilities. Collaboration helps you balance the workload and delegate core tasks to subject matter experts. For example, someone who currently works in the role is best equipped to know when job descriptions are out of date and recommend updates.
The process of collaboration uses the knowledge from collaborators to redistribute tasks, so everyone makes the most out of their precious time without taking devastating shortcuts. You’ll save time on research and create or update job descriptions in a fraction of the time.
But collaboration without flexible workflows or clear approval processes can delay your progress and keep you from efficiently creating and updating job descriptions.
That’s where the benefits of collaborative tools come in.
What are collaborative tools?
Collaborative tools are online services or software that allow individuals throughout an organization or group to work together on a single task. Collaborative tools allow individuals to offer real-time contributions. These contributions (such as document editing) vary depending on the collaborative tool you use.
Benefits of Collaborative Tools
Collaborative tools accelerate and expand on all the other benefits of collaboration. When it comes to job descriptions, the benefits of collaborative tools can help you do your best work, faster and easier. Here are just a few benefits of collaborative tools you can use to make your job description processes even better:
1. Agile workflows: Job descriptions require continual review and maintenance. Without a clear process, contributors spend more time and effort than is necessary to complete the task. On the other hand, collaborative tools allow you to receive and apply iterative feedback from all necessary stakeholders in one place.
2. Compliance documentation: Collaborative tools allow you to view and respond to everyone’s feedback. Some collaborative tools allow you to keep version histories, as well, so you can keep records and improve compliance.
3. Clear approval process: No more completing work just to find another e-mail with more feedback. With the right collaborative tools, you can see which stakeholders have approved content and which still have feedback to give.
4. Meeting deadlines: Some collaborative tools help you not only work on a job description, but also complete it in time. From hiring to annual reviews, you may have reasons to set a specific deadline to complete the creation or update of a job description. Certain collaborative tools, like Quinto, allow you to track the revision process in each part of your job description and send reminders to contributors, so you stay on top of deadlines.
5. Remote access: Collaboration among distributed teams can suffer without the right support, processes, and tools. By working online with collaborative tools, stakeholders can facilitate meaningful conversations through comments, tracked changes, and reactions—no matter where they work.
Job Description Collaboration Example
Kayla is a newly hired HR specialist. Her boss tasked her with creating job descriptions for a new branch of the company. Her focus is to help the company hire 300 new customer service representatives.
She digs into the company’s database and discovers that the job description files are years out of date. A few of the physical documents she finds even mention the importance of being fast on a typewriter.
She uses a search engine to find information on the best job descriptions for customer service representatives. Unfortunately, she finds nothing except vague requirements and inconsistencies. Frustrated and overwhelmed, Kayla calls her mentor Yuliya, head of sales at the company’s New York branch.
Yuliya isn’t surprised to hear about Kayla’s challenges. She’s encountered the same problems before in New York, where she had to significantly modify the job descriptions at her branch because they were not up to date with the industry standards.
Yuliya also warns Kayla that the job description templates on search engines are nice, but they don’t help much since they need extensive reviews to ensure they align with the company’s standards.
To help Kayla, Yuliya offers to send a job description template she uses and gives a few recommendations of emerging skills and competencies that may be needed for customer service representatives. Yuliya also shows Kayla Quinto, a job description software she uses to update existing job descriptions.
Relieved from all Yuliya’s help, Kayla reviews the job description template and makes edits using the collaborative tools Yuliya suggested. Then, she sends it back to Yuliya and invites other subject matter experts to review the job description. While the others review her work, track changes, leave and reply to each other’s comments, and approve content, Kayla gets time back to work on her other tasks.
When she is ready, Kayla addresses everyone’s feedback, applies tracked changes, and responds to queries—being mindful of her progress along the way with Quinto’s built-in progress tracker. With a streamlined and agile workflow, she easily completes this project by her deadline and impresses her new boss, too!
Become Confident Using Collaborative Tools
When building or updating job descriptions, the benefits of collaborative tools can accelerate your process and enhance results. Quality job descriptions go beyond hiring and help people leaders develop fair and aligned talent programs.
Would you be proud to show your job descriptions to another HR professional?
If you are even a little hesitant, it’s time to reconsider your job descriptions and how you approach them. Time-saving collaborative tools, like the ones available only on Quinto, help streamline the process and allow you to focus on other strategic HR initiatives. Request a demo today to learn more.
