Steve,

I really have to disagree here. Perhaps there are some companies who have crack HR teams where the work actually matches the job description, but even then, that's still very generic and doesn't get into the daily and weekly objectives someone has to get their job done and that would influence what a persona needs to convey.

If I look at myself, what I do in my daily job and how that is reflected in my official job description, the two are very different. The job description fits (roughly) from about 30,000 feet. The persona needs to fit much better, from about 1,000 feet.

The role (vs. persona) definitions that I describe in my blog post "What's the deal with Personas?"

http://onproductmanagement.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/whats-the-deal-with-personas/

provide much more detail than any HR job description I've seen but don't go overboard in terms of minute details. :-)

Saeed

In theory, it sounds like a good short-cut, but if you are reaching to job profiles from HR for developing your personas, stop! Instead, you should get out and talk with more users (or if you don't have users, find some potential users).

Creating a persona (at least the type that I use), has much less to do with the job description than it does with the problems of a user. A persona tied strictly to a job description doesn't help me figure out what the pain points are, which is crucial to successful products.

Sometimes there are short-cuts you can take to go faster, but this isn't one of them.