How to write a position description when you don't have HR

Most position descriptions fail for the same reason: someone tries to capture everything the role could ever involve, and ends up with four pages nobody reads. A good PD does two much smaller jobs. It tells a candidate whether they should apply, and it gives you something to point back to later, in a performance conversation, a dispute, or when you're figuring out if the role has actually changed.

Here's what needs to be in it, and what you can leave out.

Start with why the role exists, not what it does

Before the task list, write two or three sentences on why this role exists and what success looks like in it. This is the part people skip and it's the most useful part, both for candidates deciding whether to apply and for you in six months when you're trying to remember what you actually hired for.

The core sections that matter

1. 1Job title. Keep it standard and searchable. "Customer success coordinator" gets found, "Happiness hero" doesn't, no matter how fun it is internally.
2. 2Reporting line. Who they report to, and if relevant, who reports to them.
3. 3Key responsibilities. Five to eight bullet points, each starting with a verb. Not twenty. If you can't fit the core of the role into eight bullets, the role probably needs splitting, not a longer list.
4. 4Must-haves versus nice-to-haves. Be honest about which is which. Padding the must-have list with things you'd merely prefer will cost you good candidates who talk themselves out of applying.
5. 5Location and work type. Onsite, hybrid, remote, and whether that's flexible.
6. 6Salary or range. Not required, but genuinely worth including if you can. It filters out mismatched applications before they land in your inbox, saving you screening time later.

A position description is not a job ad

It's easy to write these as the same document, and that's usually where things go wrong. A job ad is marketing. It can be creative, a bit fun, built to attract a personality as much as a skill set, because its only job is to get the right person to apply.

A position description does something completely different. It's an internal tool, and it needs to set the person up to succeed once they're actually in the role, not just get them through the door. That means it should make clear what's genuinely expected of them, what tools and resources they have to do the job, how much autonomy and decision-making authority sits with the role versus what needs sign-off, and what their performance will actually be measured against.

Skip any of that, and you end up with a new hire who's technically employed but genuinely unclear on what success looks like, which shows up later as underperformance that isn't really their fault. Write the ad to attract them. Write the PD to set them up.

Get the award classification right

This is the part that gets skipped most often, and it's the one with the most riding on it. Most roles in Australia sit under a modern award, and the position description is where you work out which classification actually applies, based on the real duties, skill level and responsibility of the role, not just what similar businesses call the job.

Get this wrong and it's not a paperwork problem, it's a pay problem. Underclassifying a role means underpaying someone against the award, and that's one of the most common sources of underpayment claims and staff disputes for small businesses, often discovered well after the fact and back-paid at a real cost. It also tends to surface at the worst possible time, when a relationship has already soured or an employee is leaving.

Worth checking the classification properly before the ad goes out, not after someone's already in the seat. If you're not confident the role is classified correctly against the award, that's worth a second opinion before you commit to it in writing.

What to leave out

Skip generic company boilerplate copied from your website, candidates skim past it anyway. Skip an exhaustive list of every software system or tool the role might touch, list the two or three that actually matter and note the rest are trainable. And skip vague catch-all lines like "other duties as required" doing the heavy lifting, if the role regularly involves something specific, name it.

Length

Most position descriptions should sit between 300 and 700 words, ideally viewable without much scrolling. If yours is longer, it's usually because responsibilities and nice-to-haves have been mixed together. Split them and the length problem often solves itself.

Compliance basics

Keep the language free of anything that could be read as discriminatory (age, gender assumptions in the phrasing, physical requirements that aren't genuinely necessary for the role). If you're unsure whether a requirement is genuinely necessary or just how it's always been written, that's worth a second opinion before the ad goes live.

If you'd rather not start from a blank page

Writing a PD from scratch is one of those tasks that's simple in theory and easy to get wrong in practice, whether that's making it too vague to attract the right people, too long for anyone to finish reading, or classified against the wrong award. If you'd rather talk through the role with someone first, whether that's scoping it as part of a recruitment process or getting the award classification checked properly, that's exactly the kind of thing we help with.

Talk to us about a role or get in touch at hello@happyhumans.com.au.