Creating Your New IT Hire’s Major Responsibility Buckets
The best way to search for the right IT candidate for your position is to be crystal clear on the responsibilities they will take on starting with day one. It also helps the candidate know what they are getting into when they take on your position.
These two things help put you on the road to success when adding a new player to your team. And the best part is, you get both those benefits from doing one IT position exercise.
Create Your New Position’s Major Responsibility Buckets
Based on what you’ve discovered through the Gap Analysis and the writing of your IT position’s Major Goal, it’s time to list out Major Responsibility Buckets for this position.
We recommend choosing the six most important Responsibility Buckets for this position. There may be more, but you want to focus on the major areas of responsibility as too many variables make it too hard to manage.
Think about the role you are trying to fill and decide what the six major areas of responsibility will be for this position. It seems simple, but it takes some thought.
What are the Major Responsibility Buckets?
Major Responsibility Bucket choices include but are not limited to:
- Leadership
- Financial
- Team Engagement
- Innovation
- Personal Development
- Technical Development
- Client Acquisition
- Account Management
- Customer Service
- Reporting
You will need to customize your Responsibility Buckets for each position, i.e, an executive role may include leadership and team engagement buckets while a Junior Helpdesk role would focus more on Customer Service and Reporting.
Next Fill Your Responsibility Buckets with Ideal Outcomes
With your responsibility buckets established, you will create appropriate results or outcomes for each major function. You want to be as specific, measurable and as manageable as you can using Smart Goals and KPI’s where appropriate and available. This will help later in the process.
Think in terms of the calendar year. What do you want them to accomplish in these areas over the next 30-days, 60-days, 90-day and a year. You can choose your own appropriate timeline that works within your organization.
For example, if you’ve chosen the Financial Responsibility Bucket you don’t want to say, “increase revenue.” You want to be specific and say “Increase revenue by 10% in the first 90 days.” Or instead of saying bring in new clients, you’d say “Bring in 5 new clients in the first year.”
If you’ve chosen the Responsibility Bucket Technical Development you don’t want to say “accurately code.” You want to say, “Code accurately 95% of the time in the first 60 days.” or you could say, “Resolve most technical support issues 75% of the time.”
Smart Goals are specific, measurable and easy to manage. Review each Role Bucket’s desired results and outcomes for the position and turn them into Smart Goals before moving to the next step.
Stuck? Google KPIs to get the ideas flowing.
What if I Don’t Know the Ideal Outcome?
Keep in mind, sometimes you won’t know exactly what you need for a Responsibility Bucket or how you want to measure it. That could be because you need the new candidate to help develop a procedure.
This is a great discovery because now you know you are looking for a candidate who isn’t coming in to work a system, but rather partner with you to develop the system. You can place, “Develop procedure within 90 days” in that Responsibility Bucket. Now you know you are looking for someone with experience creating and implementing procedures or systems for a company.
Set yourself and your candidate up for success by taking the time to create the Responsibility Buckets for your IT position. From here you’ll be ready to move on to the Position Timeline to even further strengthen your search.
To learn more about how the Major Responsibility Buckets work within creating an IT Job Description visit our Guide to Developing the Ultimate Outcome Driven Job Description.
Or contact us and we can help you create this tool and find you the perfect IT candidate to create your winning team.