Write the page while there is nobody to write it about. Six blocks fit on one sheet: what the job requires, the steps from announcement to decision in the order they happen, who takes part in each step, the three to five questions every candidate answers, where the vacancy is announced, and where the applications are kept, for how long, and who can open them. Ninety minutes, done in a quiet week. A requirement written while somebody is sitting across the table from you is not a requirement, it is a description of that person.
The vacancy usually opens the way it opened last time. Somebody leaves in the month when the operation can least afford to stop, the search starts by asking a neighbor and asking the people already working, and no paper says what the job needs. Each conversation weighs something different, the decision falls to whoever came across best on the day, and three months later the farm finds out the person could not do the one thing it needed most. Nobody can point to the step where that should have been asked, because there were no steps.
Hiring is also where a succession page stops being about family. When no one inside the farm holds one of the decisions that a written succession plan asks you to assign, the honest answer to that row is to hire somebody, and this page is where that answer turns into a sequence somebody can follow.
What has to exist on paper before the vacancy is announced
The requirement, split into two columns. Teagasc’s farm labour manual, written for Irish farm employers, asks for a Person Specification alongside the job description, described as an important summary of the type of person you ideally want to hire, setting out qualifications, knowledge, skills and attributes. The template splits each row into what a candidate has to have and what would be good to have, and the manual gives the plainest possible example of the first column: if the person needs to drive to an out farm, holding a current license is not negotiable.
That column is not invented for the vacancy. It is copied out of the qualifications field of the sheet the position already has, which Penn State defines as a description of any experience, training, or education that is necessary to perform the job plus the physical demands the work makes, and which warns in the same paragraph against wording that would discriminate on grounds of race, gender, age or national origin. A farm without the written job description has to describe the position twice, once on the sheet and once in the advertisement, and nothing keeps the two in agreement.
Why a requirement written after you meet somebody is not a requirement
Because by then you are testing the person against yourself instead of against the work. Penn State’s AgWorks guide gives the example that makes this concrete: if climbing a silo is part of the job, it is best to learn about a candidate’s fear of heights before you offer them the job, not on the morning the grain has to move.
The needs step comes before the search step in both guides here that set out an order. The Pork Information Gateway factsheet on recruiting agricultural employees opens with it, saying it is important to determine exactly what characteristics a potential employee needs to be successful in this position, and asking the employer to note the licences and certifications the work requires before anything is advertised. The AgWorks guide puts the same instrument at both ends of the relationship, calling the job sheet a tool for hiring the right employees and providing performance feedback once an employee is hired, which is what a farm loses when the requirement is improvised.
The order the steps go in, and what each one leaves on paper
Needs first, the file last, and the two guides agree on what sits between. The Pork Information Gateway runs determining the need, writing the job description, recruiting, evaluating applications, interviewing, selecting with reference checks, extending the offer, and record keeping. Teagasc runs the job description and the person specification, the advertisement, the assessment of applications by the closing date, the interview with a practical part, and the written ranking. Written out as one column, that is the second block of the page, and the farm crosses out the steps it does not do rather than inventing an order of its own.
| Step | What gets written down there |
|---|---|
| 1. Name what the job needs | The requirement in two columns, copied from the position sheet |
| 2. Draft the advertisement | Title, role in two or three lines, location, duration, how to apply, where to ask |
| 3. Announce it | The channels, more than one, and the closing date |
| 4. Read the applications against the requirement | Who is out on the first column, and why |
| 5. Interview | The same three to five questions, in the same order, with a similar amount of time for each person |
| 6. Watch the work | What the candidate is asked to do, and for how long |
| 7. Write the assessment | One page per candidate and a ranking, before anybody names a favorite out loud |
| 8. Call the references | The same questions to each former employer, inside the process and not after it |
| 9. Decide, offer, and tell the others | The name chosen, the reasons, and the date |
| 10. File it | Where the folder sits, for how long, and who can open it |
The skills farm employers name, and the ones the conversation never reaches
Mostly not the technical ones. Penn State researchers surveyed Pennsylvania dairy producers by mail in 2003, published in the Journal of Extension by Kathryn Brasier, Jeffrey Hyde, Richard Stup and Lisa Holden, and asked operators which skills they wanted for each of nine job titles. What comes back is an order, not a rate.
Communication was named as desired or required by a majority of the respondents for all but one of the job titles, problem solving ran with it, and in all but two of the nine titles both sat above the two skills that come with a certificate, pesticide application and artificial insemination. The two exceptions are named as well: for the crop manager, pesticide application came up level with communication, and for the heifer manager, artificial insemination sat above both.
That order is the only thing worth carrying out of the article. The list was built to reach herds of 150 cows or more, from a state department of agriculture list and a trade magazine’s subscriber list, 121 producers returned valid data and 72 of them employed workers, and the authors say plainly that the farms they surveyed were significantly larger than the average dairy farm in the state.
One state, one year, and a sample chosen for who was likely to have hired help: it describes who answered and never who needs the page. What it does record is what employers say they want, which is exactly the point. Communication and problem solving are the requirements the farm names first and then never asks a single question about, because nobody writes a question for them and everybody assumes they will be able to tell.
Why the candidate who came across best is not evidence
Because the feeling of having read somebody is produced by the conversation whether or not the conversation contained anything. Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson ran three studies published in Judgment and Decision Making in 2013 in which people predicted fellow students’ semester grades from real background information and, for one student, from an unstructured interview. In one condition the person being interviewed was answering with a random response system, and the finding is the one worth carrying: participants formed interview impressions just as confidently after getting random responses as they did after real responses, and having the interview led participants to make worse predictions than not having it.
Two limits belong beside that. These were students predicting other students’ grades, not farmers hiring stockpeople, so what travels is the mechanism and not a rate anybody can expect. And the authors’ own recommendation is blunter than this page: they say not to use unstructured interviews at all, while the guides written for farms say to structure them. What both agree on is that the structure has to exist on paper before the first candidate walks in, because an interviewer who has not written the questions down will keep asking until the answers fit the impression already formed.
The same questions, in the same order, timed the same
Three to five, written before anyone applies. The Pork Information Gateway factsheet asks the employer to prepare a list of core questions for every candidate, notes that preparation is what guarantees that the format and questions are the same for each applicant, and adds that where possible the same person or persons should interview all candidates. AgWorks turns the same thing into a question the farm can answer yes or no about itself: do you have a list of standard questions and a rating scale that you use to limit bias.
Teagasc builds the list from the sheet rather than from imagination, asking the employer to pick out the 5-6 important areas to focus on, based on the job description and the specification, and to prepare a few questions for each.
Three instructions from that manual belong on the page itself, because they are the ones that get skipped: allow a similar amount of time for each person, add a practical part to the selection so that a farm worker is watched doing the work, and afterwards sit down and write your assessment of each candidate and rank them. Reference checks are the last step and not a courtesy, and the factsheet is blunt about why, saying recommendations from former employers speak volumes and putting them inside the selection process rather than beside it.
Where the vacancy gets announced, and what the announcement has to say
In more than one place, and never only by word of mouth. The Pork Information Gateway lists eight routes, among them internal postings, employee referral programs, employment agencies, job placement services at educational institutions, job fairs, recruitment websites and classified advertising, and it warns that concentrated recruitment efforts are generally more effective long-term than scattering effort at random groups. AgWorks adds the free public employment service, social media and web-based employment sites, and asks whether the advertisement explains why someone should work for you, which is a different question from whether it lists duties. The public service it names is a state one, so the reader outside that state writes down whichever public employment service exists where the farm is.
The advertisement is short and it is not the job sheet. Teagasc lists what has to be in it: the job title, the role described in 2-3 lines, the location, the duration of the contract, how to apply and where to get more information. Pay and hours are the two fields Penn State marks optional on the position sheet, and the announcement is where they get filled in, which is why the sheet survives three vacancies and the advertisement does not. A new position is also a line of expense before it is a person, so it should already appear in a declared price assumption with the assumption written beside it.
The record, and the rule that switches on the moment you write
Writing the page is what creates the obligation, not hiring. Two sections of the same United States federal rule say so in sequence. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states in 29 CFR 1602.12 that it has not adopted any requirement, generally applicable to employers, that records be made or kept. Then 29 CFR 1602.14 says that any personnel or employment record made or kept by an employer, application forms submitted by applicants and other records having to do with hiring among the examples it names, shall be preserved by the employer for a period of one year from the date of the making of the record or the personnel action involved, whichever occurs later.
Read backwards, that pair says something uncomfortable and useful. A farm that writes nothing has nothing to preserve, and it also has nothing to produce when somebody asks how the decision was made. Whether a particular farm falls under those acts, and what applies instead where the reader farms, is not a question this page answers: Teagasc puts it well for its own readers, saying you do not need to be an expert but you do need the basics, and naming the accountant and the solicitor you already deal with as the people who supply them.
What travels across every border is the shape of the file, and the Pork Information Gateway names its contents: the current job description, the recruitment methods and sources, the applications, the evaluation logs, who was interviewed, who gave references, the interview and reference questions, the candidate selected, and the reasons for selecting that candidate, with all notes kept business-related.
Write the retention period on the page as your own decision, with the place and the person who holds the key. The decision ends there, and the first-day list starts on the next line.
What the page gets wrong, and who rewrites it
Whoever ran the search, in the week after the hire, while the gaps are still annoying. The page is a declared standard like any other on the farm, which means it comes back to the table with a date on it: the requirement nobody asked about, the step that happened out of order, the channel that produced nobody, the question that turned out to separate candidates and was not on the list.
One correction is worth naming in advance. The requirement the new person did not meet is rarely a reason to reopen the search, and it is almost always a line for the training plan, which wants exactly that shape: the gap named as a task, the person who closes it, and the month. Deciding the farm can live with the gap belongs on the hiring page, before the offer, and not on the day the gap becomes a problem.
A farm that knows on the first day which skill it accepted a gap in has done the hardest part of both documents at once, and the rest of the people axis is built on that habit of writing down what you decided while you still remember why. Control is one of the four functions of management, and here it looks like a page with a date at the bottom.
Where to start
Ninety minutes, one sheet, filed next to the position it describes.
The uncomfortable part of writing this in a quiet week is that nobody is asking for it, and that is the only condition under which it is honest. Written with a candidate waiting, the requirement column reads back like a portrait of whoever is available, and the questions arrange themselves around the answers you already heard. Write it now and the next vacancy costs you an afternoon of comparing people against a standard. Write it then and it costs you three months of finding out.