How to: make sure your job description and person specification articulate what you actually need
This blog was kindly authored by Julia Roberts, Founder and Principal Consultant at Julia Roberts Advisory.
It is the third blog in our four-part ‘How To’ series that focuses on recruitment in higher education leadership roles. The first blog, on working with executive search, can be found here. The second, on recruiting non-executives, can be found here.
When someone leaves a leadership role in a university, the first instinct is almost always practical: start the recruitment process, pull up the job description on file, make a few updates and get it out to market. But if you move too quickly, you miss the most important question of all.
Are you replacing the role, or are you replacing the person?
Roles grow as people grow. Good leaders stretch their portfolios, fix long-standing problems, absorb responsibilities that never formally belonged to them and shape work in ways that reflect their strengths. By the time they leave, the job they are walking away from is often far bigger, more complex and more strategically significant than the one they started in. Yet many institutions recruit to the historical blueprint, not the current reality.
A vacancy is not an inconvenience. It is a strategic moment. It is your opportunity to pause, to look honestly at what your institution needs now and to redesign the role around today’s challenges rather than yesterday’s structure.
This requires discipline. Instead of reaching for the old document, start with the work. What problems actually need solving? What outcomes matter most over the next one to two years? How has the environment shifted? Regulatory pressure is tighter. Financial pressure is heavier. Digital maturity is becoming non-negotiable. AI and cyber risk now sit at the heart of institutional resilience. None of this existed in the same form when that original job description was drafted.
When you write from the present rather than the past, the shape of the role changes. You shift from describing tasks to identifying outcomes. You distinguish between what this leader must do and what they must enable. Leadership in universities is never about personal output. It is about building the capability, clarity and confidence that allow others to thrive.
A strong job description must describe a leader who can create the conditions for success, support people to grow, strengthen relationships across academic and professional communities and foster psychological safety so colleagues can raise concerns and contribute ideas.
The person specification needs equal attention. It must focus on the capabilities that genuinely predict success: judgement, resilience, influence without authority, enabling others, confidence with digital systems and regulatory complexity and a track record of strengthening teams and culture.
Language matters. Avoid internal shorthand and sector specific jargon. Write for candidates who may bring valuable external experience. Clear, accessible language widens your field and signals openness.
Finally, test the documents. Share them with someone outside your institution. Ask them to explain the role back to you. If they cannot articulate the purpose, outcomes and expectations, refine again.
A vacancy is one of the few chances an institution has to realign a role with its strategic needs. Treat your job description and person specification as the tools they are: instruments of clarity, ambition and institutional renewal.
Key Takeaways
- Start by asking whether you are replacing the role or the person.
- Ignore the job description on file until you understand the real work.
- Focus on outcomes, not task lists.
- Make enabling others central to leadership roles.
- Write a selective, strategic person specification.
- Reflect modern leadership realities including AI and cyber.
- Use clear, inclusive language.
- Test the documents externally before publishing.
Comments
Jonathan Alltimes says:
To state the argument towards its logical direction, what is distinctive about universities, the particular university, and the job? From a community of understanding about practitioners, universities teach students methods which become skills for occupations, which once served the interests of the guild of the college, but now serves the interests of a bureacratic enterprise. The distinctiveness of a university depends on dynamic and changing specializations and teaching methods, and on conditions and constraints. The idea of roles is posited as a scientific model of work as theatre, when in fact work is the causality of artefacts and persons. The distinctiveness of the job is set by the aforementioned situation and the purpose of the organization. The direction is either the autonomy and independence of the guild of the college or it is the profitability of the enterprise and its profit centres. The question which remains is how you choose to organize the work of others.
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