Write the Job Description After You Fix the Job

Written by Orkan Arat

Most small companies hire the same way. Something hurts. Orders ship late, the inbox overflows, the owner works Sundays. Someone says, “We need to hire.” Then the job description gets written from the pain. Every annoying task that lands on the desk of the person who is drowning goes onto the list of duties.

The result is not a job. It is a pile.

The pile is really three roles

Read the last description your company wrote for an operations or admin hire. Customer questions, bookkeeping follow-up, scheduling, social posts, vendor calls, and “other duties as needed.” That is a receptionist, a bookkeeper, and a marketing coordinator wearing one title. Those jobs need different skills, different temperaments, and different pay.

You will not find one person who is excellent at all three. So you hire someone who is acceptable at all three, and the new person starts to sink. Within a few months they are tired and behind. The team, which wrote the description and never questioned it, decides the hire was the problem. Wrong fit. Wrong person. Then you write the same description again.

The person was never the problem. The design was.

Watch where the work piles up

Before you write anything, spend two weeks watching the work itself. Not where people say it piles up. Where it actually does. Keep a plain tally. What came in, who touched it, how long it waited, and how often somebody handled it twice.

Remove what should not exist

Sort every task into one of three piles. Should not exist. Repeatable. Needs a human.

Start with the first pile, because deleting is the cheapest fix and the one people skip. Reports nobody reads. Approvals that approve everything. Weekly meetings that exist because they always did. Typing the same data into a second system because two tools never got connected. No description should ever ask a new hire to carry these.

Automate what is truly repeatable

Be honest about what AI can take. It handles work that is repeatable, well defined, and low in judgment. Answering the same handful of customer questions. Booking calls. Sorting inbound requests. Drafting a first reply. Moving information between tools. Summarizing a long thread.

My company builds AI agents for exactly this kind of work at Plondo Network (https://plondo.com), so I have watched both what they absorb and where they stop.

They stop at relationships, judgment calls, and accountability. An agent can draft an apology to a customer who has been let down three times. It cannot decide whether to refund, whether to keep that customer, or whether to fire the vendor who caused it. And when something goes wrong, someone must own it. An agent cannot answer for an outcome. A person can, and that person needs to be a named human.

Then write the description

What remains is usually the part that needs judgment, relationships, and ownership. Write the description for that. It will often be shorter than the old one. It may be more senior, and it may pay more. That is fine. It describes a real job that one real person can do well.

A clean description also helps you hire more fairly. A long list of odd duties and inflated requirements makes strong candidates talk themselves out of applying. A clear description of real work does not.

A role built from leftovers is unfair

There is a trap here. If you automate everything easy and hand the person only what machines could not do, you have built a job made entirely of exceptions. Every case they see is the hard one, the angry one, the unclear one. Nobody can do that all day and stay steady.

So keep some routine work in the role on purpose. Tell candidates plainly what the agents handle and what is theirs. Give them authority to change how the automation works, because they will see its mistakes first. Tools also break, and someone must own that.

Do not use this to understaff

This method can turn into a pretext. A founder sees a list of automatable tasks and decides the salary is unnecessary. Do not do that. Decide headcount from the work, not from the budget you hoped to save.

Run one honest test at the end. After you remove and automate, is what remains more than one person can do well in a normal week? If yes, hire two people. Sometimes that is the whole answer, and the exercise still helped, because now you know what each of the two people will actually do.

Fix the job first. Then write the description. Then hire.

Author Bio: Orkan Arat is the Chief Executive Officer of Plondo Network Inc.