Are job descriptions dead?

Many Canadian organizations are finding themselves with a skills crunch. A recent study by Robert Half shows only five per cent of organizations say they have both the skills and headcount needed to complete highpriority projects in the year ahead, while many hiring managers report noticeable skills gaps and growing difficulty finding the right talent.  

Another survey from Express Employment Professionals and the Harris Poll adds to the picture, with Canadian hiring managers expecting trouble finding qualified candidates this year and a significant share saying their company lacks the tools to identify the right people. 

With organizations undergoing rapid transformation due to AI and other technological advances, skills-based hiring seems to be taking precedence over specific roles where duties and requirements could chance within a short period of time. Does this mean that basic job descriptions are past the point of usefulness? 

Making skills discoverable inside the organization 

At PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Canada, Sonia Boisvert, the firm’s chief people officer based in Montreal, is already using technology to make skills more visible and portable to meet the organization’s needs. She says she doesn’t expect job descriptions to vanish, but she does expect them to sit beside richer, dynamic skills data. 

“We have the technology in place right now to use the skills of our people,” says Boisvert. “We have one database where all the people have to make sure their skill set is up to date within that database, and when we look for some project with a specific skill set, then you can be more discoverable.”  

For a partnership that must assemble project teams quickly, searchable skills data can close gaps between business demand and internal capacity much faster than titlebased searches alone, says Boisvert. 

Hidden skills and experience 

Boisvert has also seen how traditional job architectures can hide valuable experience. “Sometimes, when I do a ‘Canadian roadshow,’ I find that by talking to people, they have a completely previous experience that we don't know, and they haven’t been engaged by PwC because of that,” she says. “If they have an ability to get their skills discovered for certain projects, that's what we’re going to be doing.” 

Skills inventories can surface those hidden capabilities, giving HR more options to staff priority work without always going back to a stretched external market, according to Boisvert. 

The same technology is helping PwC connect current work to future skills, according to Boisvert: “People will be more discoverable because when we're looking for projects, we’ll have a list of the people that potentially have the skills,” she says. “The other things that  [skills inventory] is doing is that if you have an interest yourself to develop a skill, then you can say within the database that you have an interest and then that’s going to be discoverable as well for people doing those projects — then you can learn from that.”  

By creating a more dynamic internal market, where formal roles remain important but no longer define the full extent of a person’s contribution, the firm promotes and maximizes the skills of its workforce outside of the boundaries of job definitions, says Boisvert. 

An evolving tool 

Grace Ewles, practice lead on the HR Research and Advisory Services team at McLean and Company, believes that role profiles still matter, but need to be used differently. “At their core, job descriptions are a tool — they provide job seekers and employers alike with the foundational understanding of a role, expectations, and the criteria required to be successful,” says Ewles. That shared understanding supports fairness and basic accountability, and in a tight market it helps candidates selfselect into roles they can realistically perform, she adds. 

The challenge, according to Ewles, is that many organizations have allowed their basic job descriptions to become bloated and outdated. “What we've seen in our research is that effective job descriptions help to create clarity around role expectations, and that can be associated with increased engagement and job satisfaction,” she says. “But the challenge is they can become over-engineered over time and become quite cumbersome to maintain keep actually reflective.” 

However, Ewles says she’s seeing more employers shifting more to a skills-based approach. “What we're seeing now, especially in kind of the light of the skills conversation, is so many organizations are pivoting to more of a flexible approach to job descriptions, really seeing it as a living document that balances that clarity with comprehension and streamlined them to allow for greater flexibility,” she says. And make sure that the job descriptions are actually accurately reflecting the nature of work as that work continues to evolve.”  

From jobs to skills without losing structure 

According to Ewles, McLean and Company’s research places organizations on a spectrum from traditional, jobbased operating models to fully skillsbased ones, with “skillsaware” employers in the middle. She says the furthest end of that spectrum requires rethinking work itself.  

“What we see in this skills space is that progression towards that fully skills-based operating model really requires deconstructing how we think about work and breaking it down into tasks or projects with no defined jobs or job descriptions,” says Ewles. “That approach won't necessarily work for every organization — that depends on the nature of the work, the technology that's available, even the organizational culture, among other factors — but there's an opportunity for organizations to adopt some of those skills-aware practices by leaning into the benefits of skills in terms of agility and things like that, while still operating within that more traditional, job-based structure.” 

For Ewles, a job architecture is most effective when it's adaptable to changes in the external environment. “The job architecture framework becomes the foundation that we can layer on additional information, like skills and competencies, and it provides a more agile kind of foundation that we can leverage as the nature of work evolves,” she says. “And for organizations that are looking to do more of a revolutionary approach in their structure and move towards that skills-based operating model, this is where we see things like internal talent marketplaces emerging, leveraging technology to help match employees to opportunities based on the skills required for a specific task or project.” 

Are job descriptions outdated? 

Both Boisvert and Ewles say no — but they’re clear that static, qualificationheavy descriptions are increasingly mismatched with a business world of rapid transformation, AI disruption, and widening skills gaps. Job descriptions need to be more of a “living, breathing document that has an easier chance of evolving as the nature of work continues to evolve,” says Ewles. 

Boisvert believes the task is less about declaring job descriptions dead and more about making them fit for a skillsdriven, AIenabled business world. “We’re rethinking core HR practices through what we call a skills-based organization, and skills are becoming our foundation in hiring, development, and career progression,” she says. “We’re moving away from static roles and focusing instead on the skills people bring, how those skills evolve, and how they can be applied in different contexts — this creates more agility, inclusion, and opportunity for our people.”