How long should a job description be? Daft question, I hear you say: “It depends.” OK, let’s turn the question round. I often find that while people can’t readily agree what a “good answer” might look like, they find it much easier to identify a bad one.

So, would 10 pages be too long? Surely 20 would? How about 41?

I’m serious. That’s the length of a job description a colleague came across the other day in the course of work we’re carrying out in the health sector to identify possible “nationally transferable roles” (a rather helpful concept for tidying up the best of local initiatives and making them interchangeably available to all).

And I’m not cheating: this is a description of a serious job (a specialist nurse) working for a serious employer (a primary care trust). The only thing not serious about it is that it is labelled a “post outline”. Credit where credit’s due – I can only presume that’s a quiet joke from the bureaucrat responsible, who knows that this is nonsense and who is fighting back in the only way he can.

I am confident that not even the author has read this monster all the way through. I am confident because it is clearly the result of a cut-and-paste exercise, lifting section after section from the NHS’s Knowledge and Skills Framework. To be fair, there is a clear 43-word statement defining the job purpose, but that’s the only indication that the author has given any thought to whether all these words might be helpful to a post holder.

It reminded me of the last time I had a job description. As I run my own small consultancy, I think even the most ardent advocate of job descriptions would think it rather over the top for me to write one for myself, but the last time I had one – as chief executive of a training and enterprise council in the early 1990s – it was 12 pages long. I’m a conscientious chap, so I did start reading it. But I never finished.

I never finished because I realised that while it might possibly be serving someone else’s interests (though I doubted that too), it most certainly wasn’t serving mine. It was an unprioritised list of all the things that I might just be expected to do, but it gave me no useful guidance on what my board wanted me to do, about what mattered more and what mattered less, or about how my performance might be judged. It was an irrelevance.

My simple conclusion is that if a job description does not help a post holder to do a better job, even one page is too long.