What Can Candidates Learn from a Job Description - and What Can't They?

​A job description can tell you a lot about a role. But it can't tell you everything.

It can explain the responsibilities, reporting line, experience required and skills a firm is looking for. It might give you an indication of the structure of the team and where the position sits within the wider organisation.

All of that is important. But some of the questions candidates really want answered when considering their next move are much harder to fit into a job description.

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• What is the team actually like?

• Why has the role become available?

• What will the person spend most of their time doing?

• What does the hiring manager really want from their next hire?

• How might the role develop?

• And what is it actually like to work there?

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That is where the conversations surrounding a vacancy can become just as important as the document itself.

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Start with what the job description does tell you

It sounds obvious, but a good job description deserves more than a quick scan before deciding whether to apply. There are usually useful clues throughout it.

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• The responsibilities tell you where the emphasis of the role is likely to sit.

• The reporting line can help you understand the position's level of autonomy and where it sits within the team.

• The experience requirements give an indication of the technical background the firm believes will be needed to succeed.

• And the language used throughout can often tell you whether the emphasis is on technical delivery, stakeholder interaction, management, project work or a combination of these.

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For specialist roles within Risk & Compliance and Knowledge, these distinctions can be particularly important. Two positions carrying very similar titles can look quite different once you examine what the person will actually be doing.

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Don't necessarily treat every requirement as a checklist

This is another area where conversation can be useful. Candidates sometimes look at a job description, see one or two requirements they don't meet and decide the position isn't for them. But job descriptions inevitably describe an ideal profile.

Some requirements will be fundamental. Others may be preferences. And occasionally there will be skills a firm would be comfortable allowing the successful candidate to develop once they join. The difficulty for someone reading the job description is knowing which is which.

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• For example, does the firm genuinely require experience of a particular system, or would experience of a comparable system be sufficient?

• Is previous law firm experience essential?

• Does someone need to have managed people previously, or would experience mentoring and supervising others potentially be relevant?

• Is a particular technical specialism fundamental to the position or simply advantageous?

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The answers will vary enormously from role to role. That's why we wouldn't encourage candidates to either ignore the requirements or assume that every bullet point carries exactly the same weight.

Sometimes it is worth having the conversation.

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The job description can't always tell you why the role exists

Context matters.

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• A vacancy created because somebody has been promoted is different from one created through team expansion.

• A newly created role may offer different opportunities and challenges from an established position.

• A replacement hire may have a well-defined remit, while a newly created position could give the successful candidate greater scope to shape how the role develops.

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None of those situations is inherently better than another. They are simply different. Understanding the reason behind the recruitment can therefore help a candidate build a much clearer picture of the opportunity.

And it can help explain things that aren't immediately obvious from the job description.

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Then there is the team behind the role

A paragraph describing a team can only go so far. Candidates understandably want to know more.

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• How large is it?

• How is responsibility divided?

• Who would they work most closely with?

• How experienced are the other team members?

• How does the team interact with partners, fee-earners and other business services functions?

• What is the hiring manager's approach?

• What are the team's current priorities?

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For someone considering spending several years of their career with a firm, these aren't minor details. They're part of understanding whether the opportunity is right for them.

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This is where our client relationships matter

At Pembury Legal, one of the advantages of specialising in law firm business services recruitment is the relationships we develop with the firms we recruit for. With many of our clients, our understanding doesn't begin when a new vacancy arrives.

We may have recruited for the team previously. We may have worked with the hiring manager on other searches. We may understand how the function is structured, how it has developed and the types of people who have previously been successful there.

And, importantly, we can speak directly with our clients when candidates have questions that aren't answered by the job description. That relationship allows us to give candidates more context around an opportunity.

Not a sales pitch. Not assumptions about what a firm might be like. But information gathered through the conversations we have with the people actually making the hire.

Sometimes that might be understanding which parts of a specification are particularly important. Sometimes it's knowing more about the team structure or why the position has arisen. Sometimes it's being able to explain what the hiring manager hopes the successful candidate will bring to the team. And sometimes it's simply going back to the client and asking a question on the candidate's behalf.

For us, that is an important part of specialist recruitment.

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Culture is much harder to put on paper

Almost every candidate wants to understand culture. It's also one of the hardest things to describe accurately.

Words such ascollaborative, supportive, dynamic and inclusive appear frequently across the employment market, but understandably candidates want to know what those words mean in practice.

Even then, culture isn't something a recruiter can simply define on behalf of an entire organisation. Large law firms contain different teams, personalities, management styles and working environments. One person's ideal culture may not be another's.

Our role is therefore less about telling someone"you'll love the culture" and more about helping them gather enough information to make their own assessment.

That might involve discussing what we know about the team, the working arrangements, management structure and expectations, and then encouraging candidates to explore those areas further during the interview process.

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Interviews fill in another part of the picture

The job description is the starting point. Conversations with a recruiter add context. The interview then gives both sides an opportunity to explore things in considerably more detail.

For candidates, it is a chance to understand the personalities behind the job description. It is also an opportunity to ask the questions that matter personally to them.

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• What would success look like in the first year?

• What are the team's priorities?

• How might the role develop?

• What do people enjoy about working within the team?

• What challenges is the successful candidate likely to encounter?

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Equally, the firm gets to understand the person behind the CV. That two-way exchange is important because neither a job description nor a CV tells the complete story.

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There is also information nobody can know for certain

It's worth recognising this too.

Recruiters can provide context. Hiring managers can explain their expectations. Existing team members can describe their experiences. But nobody can guarantee exactly what someone's experience of a new job will be.

Teams evolve.

Managers change.

Priorities shift.

People experience workplaces differently.

The aim isn't to eliminate every unknown before accepting a position. That's unrealistic. It's to gather enough meaningful information to make an informed decision.

Look beyond the document, without ignoring it

A job description remains one of the most useful starting points when considering a new opportunity. Read it carefully.

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• Look at the responsibilities.

• Think about where your experience matches.

• Identify where you would be stretching yourself.

• And note the things you'd like to understand better.

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But don't necessarily expect the document to answer every question you have about the opportunity. Some of the most important information comes from the conversations around it.

At Pembury Legal, we see our role as helping facilitate those conversations. Our specialist focus and the relationships we have built with our law firm clients allow us to understand the context behind many of the positions we recruit for and, where we don't know the answer, to have an open conversation with the client to find out.

Because a job description can tell you what a role is.

Understanding what that role might actually be like, and whether it could be right for you, usually requires a little more conversation.

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