Hiring: Write Out the Job Description

I'm re-reading a book by Brian Tracy called Hire and Keep the Best People. Here's a couple highlights from chapter three:

Write Out the Job Description

• Something amazing happens between your head and your hand when you write a list of all the qualities that the ideal job candidate would have.
• Practice idealization for the purpose of this exercise. Imagine that you could write a description of the perfect person and hand it over to a special service, and the service would deliver that person to you, exactly to your specifications.
• Write the job description by making a list of every task the individual will be doing from the time he or she starts in the morning until the time he or she finishes in the evening. What will the candidate be expected to do?
• List every function and responsibility that the individual will have to fulfill to do the job properly.
• Once you have a description of the ideal candidate and a clear description of everything that the candidate will be expected to do, set priorities on both lists. Decide what is more important and what is less important to success in the position. Use a simple scoring method of one (low priority) to ten (high priority) for each item.
• The clearer you are about your priorities for the job and the ideal person you are seeking, in advance, the more competently you can interview and the better hiring decision you will make.
• Think about the people with whom the person will be working. This is as important as any other factor. Everyone has to fit into a team of some kind, and it is absolutely essential that whomever you hire gets along well with his or her coworkers and is accepted by them. A mistake in this area alone can be fatal to the selection process.
• A positive, optimistic, and open-minded attitude is best. As a rule, you should refuse to hire negative or unhappy people, no matter how good they might be technically. They almost always become the cause and source of most of your problems in the workplace.