The Job Description Nobody Rewrote in Five Years

Pull the job description for almost any role that’s been filled for more than three years and read it next to what the person in that seat actually does today. The two documents barely resemble each other.

The job description says “manage vendor relationships and process invoices.” The actual role now includes negotiating contracts, owning a P&L line, managing two direct reports, and being the informal point of escalation for a function that’s grown around them without anyone formally expanding their mandate. None of that drift was a single decision. It happened one small addition at a time, over years, until the gap between the document and the job became too wide to notice as a gap at all.

Why this happens without anyone deciding it should

Job descriptions get written once, usually at the point of hiring, with real care. Then they go into a file and are never opened again unless HR needs one for a compliance reason or a new role gets posted using the old one as a template.

Meanwhile the business keeps moving. A colleague leaves and their responsibilities get redistributed informally, in a hallway conversation, not a re-scoped role. A new system gets introduced and someone becomes the de facto owner because they picked it up fastest, not because it was assigned. A gap opens up in the org chart and the person nearest to it absorbs it, quietly, because someone had to and asking felt slower than just doing it.

Each of these additions is individually reasonable. None of them individually seem worth updating a document for. The problem is cumulative, not singular — and cumulative problems are exactly the kind that never get someone’s full attention, because there’s never one moment where the mismatch is dramatic enough to force a conversation.

What this actually costs

The most direct cost shows up at exit. When that person eventually leaves, whoever writes the replacement job posting pulls the old, outdated description, because it’s what’s on file. The business then hires against a role that hasn’t existed in its stated form for years — and is confused when the new hire, doing exactly what the posting described, can’t actually do the job the previous person was doing.

There’s a second cost that’s less visible but arguably larger: compensation and reporting structure often stay pegged to the original, narrower scope, even as the actual responsibility has expanded well past it. The person doing genuinely more senior work is still formally graded, and paid, against a job description written for a much smaller role. That’s a retention risk that doesn’t announce itself until the person leaves for a role that actually matches what they’ve been doing for the past two years.

Why nobody catches it

This isn’t a failure of any individual manager. It’s a structural gap: nobody owns the job description after it’s written. HR owns the initial hire. The line manager owns day-to-day performance. But the specific task of periodically checking whether the written role still matches the real one belongs to nobody, so it doesn’t happen, by default, everywhere, until an exit or a comp review forces the question.

What actually fixes this

Review job descriptions on a fixed cycle, tied to something that already happens. The easiest way to make this durable is to attach it to the annual performance review, not create a separate process people will deprioritise. When the manager and the person sit down to talk about the year, five minutes of that conversation should be: does this document still describe what you actually do?

Treat a significant mismatch as a compensation and reporting-line conversation, not just a paperwork update. If the review reveals the role has genuinely grown, rewriting the description without addressing the pay or seniority attached to it fixes the document and ignores the actual problem.

Use exits as a forced checkpoint, not a shortcut. When someone leaves, don’t default to reposting their old job description. Take the week to write down what they were actually doing at the end, not what the file says they were hired to do — even though this is slower and less convenient in the moment.

Make one person responsible for noticing drift, even informally. It doesn’t need to be a formal system. It needs to be someone’s explicit job to occasionally ask “does this still match reality” — because if it’s everyone’s job by default, in practice it’s nobody’s.

The reframe worth making

A job description isn’t a hiring document you write once and file. It’s a snapshot that starts going stale the moment the role starts being lived in. The businesses that avoid this problem aren’t the ones with better-written descriptions on day one — they’re the ones who treat staleness as something to check for on a schedule, rather than discovering it, expensively, the day someone hands in their notice.

If the job description on file for a key role hasn’t been touched since it was written, that’s worth checking before the next exit forces the conversation. See how our People & Capability practice works →