Craft Venture: creating your new job, part II

I hope you all  had wonderful Easter weekends! Welcome to Craft Venture! Im Brenda from Phydeaux Designs ““ continuing to help you learn how to make great hiring decisions! Last week, we talked about the true costs of an employee (hint:  its not just salary!). This week, well finish what we started  last week:  defining and creating a “reality-based job.”

Why go through all the bother of creating a defined job for the position you need? Because the work you do now will save you time and pain down the road, trust me! Your job description serves many purposes, including creating your plan for recruitment, training and even basis for evaluation. After all, if you haven’t defined what you hired your employee to do, how do you know if he or she is doing it well … or at all?

The good news is that your job description can be as simple as a few sentences or an outline. And an outline is easy to create. Let’s look at my job details template from last week (which you can download for your own use!).

Not all of these items are  things that I can hire someone else to do, so let’s simplify this!

Hiring an administrative assistant makes a lot of sense looking at this list. However, just to be sure, let’s take another crack  at our work categories (“type of work”)!

You can define your work  categories any way you’d like. I chose to use one or two words for a first level revision (“revised 1,”  above). Then I used a higher level definition for “revised 2.” For that second column, I wanted to use “administrative” as one of my categories, knowing that much of the work is administrative. However, I didn’t think that cleaning my shop is administrative, so I chose “cleaning” (you could use “housekeeping” or another word that makes more sense to you). Although I might have used “administrative” for my proofing tasks, I chose “editing.” If I really hired someone to proof for me, I’d need significant editing experience,  given my own background in writing and editing. I have two very different jobs in this list:  a fairly entry level administrative assistant and a proofreader/technical editor. I certainly don’t the resources to hire an editor, so we’ll remove those tasks from the list.

At the same time, I sorted my list,  first by my top level categories (see above, #1), then by my original categories (#2). And look! We now have an outline:

Add your specific tasks, and you have a more detailed outline:

We can replace the one time/very specific travel arrangements to Brooklyn for a more generic “travel arrangements for craft and  trade shows,” but you get the drift.

We can use our outline to define the needed skills and experience and create a formal job description. Keep your outline, because you can revise it for future jobs. The example I’ve used is a rather simple job without a long list of tasks; however, many of us will be hiring very part time people to perform just a few tasks.

Next week, we will create the job description, including the required and preferred skills, education and experience necessary to perform the work!

If you’d love help more specific help creating your own job, let me know! Have any questions about how to do this with your job(s)? I’ll be others have similar questions – let us know in the comments or you can also email me at brenda ( at ) phydeauxdesigns.com. Or, share with us your own experiences with job creation!

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Image Credit: Claire Marie Vogel