We all implicitly know the truth of the saying that people are what make a place.

Yet the one piece of recruitment ammunition that can help businesses to find those people – the trusty job description – is often the most neglected first step in that process.

Business executives and HR experts have increasingly questioned the job description's usefulness in the hiring process, and it’s easy to understand why: for both hopeful candidates and workers, the specifications, details, and phrasing in job descriptions are frequently causes of bias, misunderstanding, and annoyance.

The order might change depending on which source you use, but in a list of the most common reasons why change management and transformation projects fail, poor communication is always near the top of the list.

Often, lack of resources comes on top of the pile, but my own view is that it’s possible – if challenging – to deliver successful change processes without being fully resourced; but it’s impossible to do that if you communicate badly.

As a small business, it’s sometimes hard to find a balance between working on your business and working in it. Ultimately, as any decent business coach will tell you, you want to be working towards doing more of the former and less of the latter.

If you’re continuously working in your business – by which I mean carrying out the day-to-day activities that are directly linked to revenue generation (for example, making sales calls) – the chances are you’re not paying enough attention to the things that actually impact on financial performance.

In conversations I’ve been having recently I’ve noticed a growing trend in how people respond when they’re asked about their job.

Where once they might talk about their ambitions, or their achievements, their responsibilities, or the challenges they face, they now tend to talk about their level of happiness. Or, expressed differently, their contentment.

What has been significant in that, though, is the degree of investment that employees have in their workplace.

If you were to run a survey of 100 HR professionals today, asking what their top three priorities are right now, I’d be very surprised if almost all of them didn’t have talent acquisition and retention in there.

In the last few years there has been an increasing sense of understanding within the business community that losing (and, consequently, hiring) talent is a costly business – and that it pays to hang on to your best people.