Well-written job descriptions are crucial to effective employee recruitment and performance management. Here are tips and tools to help you ensure that your job descriptions hit the mark.

A job description serves several important functions, chief among them:

• to help you recruit, develop, and retain talented staff 
• to provide information for recruitment advertisements
• to help you and your staff member by clarifying responsibilities, so that you can effectively evaluate her or his performance and results.

Accurate job descriptions also help you maintain an equitable compensation system and ensure legal compliance.

A job description should contain sufficient information to describe major responsibilities and essential functions, but it should not include every detail of what work is performed and how. That way, the document remains useful even when minor changes occur.

Association professionals often wear many hats, especially in smaller organizations. When writing your job descriptions, don’t be afraid to mix and match responsibilities and job requirements to fit your needs. Staff members or supervisors may write the job description, but the supervisor must approve it.

Be sure to review your job descriptions annually and update them whenever your organization makes significant changes in staff structure or responsibilities.

Tools You Can Use

Job description template: Adapt our template to create job descriptions for your organization.

Job summaries:  Review descriptions of 75 common association job roles compiled from ASAE’s Association Compensation & Benefit Study, along with base median salaries.

Sample job descriptions: Consider these samples shared by associations, and explore dozens more in ASAE’s full Models & Samples collection (membership required):

• CEO/Executive Director job description
• Program Assistant job description
• Meetings Manager job description