The role brief: what it needs to contain to be searchable

When a role will not fill, the cause is usually looked for in the market. In practice it is more often in the brief — in how the role is described. A profile listing twenty requirements without distinguishing their importance, or describing character traits instead of work, cannot be searched against or used to compare applicants, and the selection then runs on impression. This page sets out what a brief needs in order to be searchable, how to separate the essential from the desirable, and which mistakes recur in candidate profiles.

Describe the work, not the ideal person

The most useful shift is to stop describing what the person should be like and start describing what they will do. "Independent, careful and reliable" defines nobody — most applicants would be described that way, and you cannot select against it.

A usable description answers a short set of questions about the work itself, and both the advertisement and the interview questions can be derived from the answers.

What a usable description answers:

  • What the person will actually do in their first three months.
  • What equipment, systems and documentation they will work with.
  • Who they work with, and who receives the result of their work.
  • How anyone will know they are coping with the work.

Separate the essential from the desirable, explicitly

This is the single change that usually helps most. Every requirement belongs in one of two groups: what someone cannot start without, and what makes settling in easier but can be learned.

The split has two effects. It widens the group of people worth approaching, and it speeds up decisions — where a candidate meets everything essential and part of what is desirable, there is not much left to deliberate. Without the split, every requirement behaves like a condition and the profile becomes unreachable.

Know where each requirement comes from

For qualified roles it is worth knowing what stands behind each requirement. Four different things get confused in practice, and the result is a profile narrowed for no reason.

A legal requirement follows from regulation and cannot be waived — for example electrotechnical competence, or the occupational health assessment corresponding to the work category. These are requirements of Czech law.

A regulated qualification is a specific certificate whose content and scope are set by the relevant regulation or standard. The scope is what the certificate was issued for, not what the occupation is called.

An industry convention is a common requirement that no regulation imposes — experience in a particular sector, for instance.

An operational requirement is a specific system, a documentation language or a shift pattern. It is legitimate, but it is worth knowing that it is the company’s choice rather than a property of the occupation.

What is most often missing

Alongside the requirements on the candidate, a brief needs the information that decides whether a suitable person will consider the offer at all.

Whether to state a pay range is the employer’s own decision. Stating one usually raises the relevance of the responses and saves time on both sides. We do not state figures here; for orientation by occupation and region there is the Czech average-earnings information system (ISPV, Informační systém o průměrném výdělku).

For qualified roles what nobody writes down is often decisive — why the seat is empty. A new position created by growth and a seat that keeps becoming vacant are two different offers, and experienced people ask.

What the brief needs to state:

  • The shift pattern, and how regular it is.
  • Location, how reachable the site is, and any transport provided.
  • The scope and length of training.
  • Who the direct manager is, and how large the team is.
  • The reason the role is vacant.

The brief as a basis for comparison

A good brief keeps earning after selection starts, because it becomes the yardstick. When the essential requirements are named in advance, you can show for each applicant where they meet the brief and where they do not.

Without that, comparison rests on the order of interviews and on impression, which is both less reliable and harder to defend internally. When handling applicants’ details, keep to data-protection rules and collect only what relates to assessing the role.

How to tell the brief is finished

A practical test: give the brief to someone who does not know the role and ask them to describe who they would look for. If they describe someone other than the person you have in mind, the brief is not finished.

The second test is to derive three interview questions from it. If you cannot, the brief is missing a description of the actual work and has been left as a list of traits.

Request staff If you have a specific role, describe it and we will go through the brief with you.