Building a ‘job description’.

Building a job description is an important task that serves an important purpose.

When it comes to managing a business (yes, you are operating a business, your business just happens to be public accounting) cash is king.

However, when it comes to managing people, clarity is king.

Imagine, if you will, that it’s your first day at work in your office. You know nothing about public accounting, other than how valuable an accounting designation can be for your future, and you have a ‘rough idea’ of what an accounting firm does, from your careers adviser at school and from the three interviews you went through to land the job.

You’re shown to your desk, the computer is fired up, and a manager approaches you with a cardboard box containing a client’s records, dumps it on your desk and says ‘do this’. Then they walk away.

The typical new recruit could be forgiven for feeling totally overwhelmed.

Don’t laugh; I have seen cases of this happening. We will get to ‘On-boarding people’ in a later article.

The job description is built upon a series of core competencies that staff need to master to be able to be considered for a move up the totem pole, and serves a number of purposes

- It outlines the employee’s duties and responsibilities
- It sets expectations of what they should be able to accomplish while in that role
- When they exceed all expectations of the job description it is a sign that they might be ready for promotion
- It is helpful in performance reviews as a benchmark by which individual performance can be measured

Despite the useful role it plays many smaller firms and especially sole practitioners do not have job descriptions or detailed core competencies.

It’s a task that many a well-meaning practitioner has been meaning to get round to doing, but never actually found the time or the will to make it happen.

It’s a time-consuming task, but one well worth the effort.

Creating a clear job description or set of core competencies for each role within your firm will help junior staff understand the role they play in serving clients, in helping their Managers to succeed and they will also see what will be expected of them at the next level up – should they aspire to be promoted, as all good candidates do.

Whoever, sometimes we get too bogged down with the details, and I would refer you to one of the best business books ever written – Good To Great, by Jim Collins, a book I have mentioned several times before in The Bottom Line.

Collins’ theory is ‘First Who, Then What’ and the underlying principle is to get the right people on your team who will then figure out what they need in order to drive the firm forward.

In today’s tight marketplace, that’s not an easy task, but one that has to be done.
Finding the right people is an art form in itself. Do you start on campus and recruit new graduates into your training program, or should you let another firm bear the cost of training new accountants and recruit them away from those firms later on?

The choice is yours, and as a recruiter you might expect me to be biased towards recruiting talent away from your competitors, but if pushed to make a recommendation, I would say, take them straight out of school and train them yourself, it is a far better way to build a talent pool and create your own successors.

Those who ‘come up through the ranks’ are the typical ‘big firm’ model, but there is no reason whatsoever why smaller and mid sized firms cannot apply that technique too.

The initial investment in training coaching and qualifying your own staff, compared to the recruiting fees required to buy-in talent at a later date, is really good value.