Use Employee Feedback to Improve Job Requirements

Employee feedback can help improve a job description by revealing tasks, exceptions and support needs that a generic role profile misses. Treat these accounts as inputs to job analysis, then check which capabilities the work actually requires. A successful employee's story is not enough to establish a hiring criterion, and a working-condition problem is not automatically a skills gap.

Begin with the work you need done

The US Office of Personnel Management's job-analysis guidance connects job tasks, required competencies and the relationship between them. Its guidance concerns assessment and selection in its own context; the task-to-capability distinction is useful when designing a role-analysis exercise elsewhere, but it is not a substitute for your organization's recruitment process.

Choose a bounded role and a decision. For example: “What does a new service coordinator need to handle a delivery exception, and which parts can we teach during onboarding?” That produces a more useful inquiry than asking which personality traits your best employees share.

Write down the expected result, the tools available, the conditions in which the task happens and the support a new starter can reasonably use. If you cannot describe those conditions, you are not ready to turn an account of successful work into a requirement for candidates.

Ask more than one experienced person

Collect accounts from people who know the work and from managers who understand its requirements. Include different shifts, sites or kinds of assignment when they materially change the task. Look for counterexamples and changed conditions, not only success stories.

OPM describes subject matter experts as people with direct, current knowledge of the job, and explains why multiple expert perspectives help identify its requirements. For your own review, record what experience each contributor brings and where their account may not apply.

Useful prompts include:

• Describe a recent task that was harder than the job description suggests.
• What information did you notice, and what decision did it change?
• Which tools, colleagues or permissions helped you complete it?
• What would a new starter need to know before attempting it?
• Which parts could be learned with practice and support?
• When would your usual approach be inappropriate?
• Who performs this task differently, and what can we learn from that?

Explain the intended use of contributions before collecting them. A discussion presented as team support should not silently become a ranking of employees or a source of unrestricted candidate profiles.

Sort findings before adding requirements

Use the following proposed worksheet. It separates a capability from a constraint and a local habit from a requirement.

This is an analysis aid, not an automatic decision rule. Keep the original context available to authorized reviewers and distinguish a reported experience from a verified observation.

Work through a fictional example

A fictional service company wants to hire coordinators who can manage delivery exceptions. Its initial draft asks for extensive industry experience and the ability to work under pressure. Interviews with current coordinators reveal a more specific task: check whether a delayed item changes the customer's appointment, identify an approved alternative and route decisions outside their authority.

One experienced coordinator succeeds by calling a colleague who knows the stock system. Another uses a maintained exception guide. The review team should not infer that personal contacts or many years of experience are essential. It first checks whether a new starter could perform the task with access to the same information and a reliable escalation route.

The proposed role requirement becomes: “Use the available order information to identify a delivery conflict, explain approved options and escalate decisions outside the role's authority.” Product-specific system knowledge goes into the onboarding plan if it can be learned after joining. The hiring team still needs to review how to assess that task fairly and consistently.

The exercise may also reveal that the real issue is an outdated exception guide. Hiring another person will not fix that document. Assign a process owner before presenting recruitment as the solution.

Keep a review record for every proposed criterion

For each requirement, record:

1. The task and result it supports.
2. The accounts and other evidence examined.
3. Where contributors agreed, disagreed or lacked information.
4. Relevant conditions, tools and support.
5. Whether the capability is needed on entry or can be developed.
6. The person responsible for reviewing the role requirement.
7. The condition that should trigger another review, such as a new process or system.

Avoid copying quotations into a candidate assessment without context or approval. A question can help a hiring team examine relevant work, but an answer does not by itself prove that a person will perform well in a different environment.

Where Lontra may help

Lontra can support a focused conversation about work practices and the questions they raise. Its role is to help organize context for human review, not to score candidates or infer the traits of an ideal employee. Managers do not receive raw conversations; HR views aggregates subject to the minimum group threshold and authorized scope.

For capturing a specific practice, see the frontline manager knowledge-transfer guide. For gaps within your existing team, use the skills-gap analysis worksheet. If you are designing the listening process itself, start with the continuous employee feedback guide.