From time to time, the Mayor’s Clerk will solicit adventurers to complete 
JOBS on behalf of the town. These are also sometimes referred to as QUESTS when they involve retrieving items or eliminating monsters in a world beyond The Gate. You can inquire within, but for convenience these notices are also posted on the kiosk in town outside the Mayor’s Office. You can see how many jobs are available by the number of notices hung on the kiosk and clicking on it will display them.
Taking jobs is completely optional. Some jobs are performed in town over a month’s time, and you will have to assign yourself or one of your hirelings to the task. While assigned, they can’t go through The Gate or participate in other activities until another party has returned or you advance time with the 
HOURGLASS button. Other jobs require an expedition over one or more months to complete particular tasks, fetch certain items, or kill certain monsters. These types of jobs are typically referred to as quests because they are more involved. In this case, you will slot yourself to the job/quest to claim it, although it is not required that you join in the actual expedition(s). But for this reason, only one quest can be active at a time. This is not the case for jobs that merely take one month. You can slot yourself or different hirelings to different jobs simultaneously.
Jobs that only take one month typically pay an amount of coin based on how difficult or dangerous they are, and some jobs are subject to additional coin for success or for characters of a particular class attempting them. The success rate is somewhat random but can be influenced by various factors which may be hinted at in the job description as well as the recommended level. Sending characters that are well below the recommended level is not likely to be successful, and sending characters above the recommended level is more likely to succeed.
Quests will not say explicitly how much coin is offered as a reward, but it is typically substantially more than routine jobs. And many of these will reward success with weapons or armor, often times magikal in nature. However, these jobs are usually much more difficult to complete. For example, if a quest requires you to bring back a certain number of a skins of a particular creature before so many months, there is no guarantee that you’ll even encounter said monsters when you go through The Gate. It is up to you to balance the likelihood of success given the time frame and your capabilities. However, unlike with the monthly jobs there is rarely a penalty for failure (only no reward, or maybe only a lesser reward for partial success).
On monthly jobs, if you assign a hireling to a job you will have to split any proceeds equally with them. If you take the job, you receive all the coin. Generally, hirelings will get a morale boost for successful outcomes. On quests, however, any reward goes completely to you.
Some jobs are inherently dangerous, and your safety cannot be guaranteed. There may sometimes be the potential for a negative outcome or injury. Choose wisely and balance the risk and reward carefully.
The results of any job are reported in the MONTHLY NEWS after the month is over (see the Monthly News subject of the Miscellaneous section of the guide). On quests that give you several months to complete, this will also be noted in the Monthly News and indicate how much time is left.
Jobs come and go. If you see a job and choose not to perform it, it will likely be filled by someone else within a month or two and be taken down. Quests tend to last longer, but the more you delay in accepting a quest the tighter the timeline left to complete it, so you should generally make up your mind quickly whether or not to accept a quest.
A final note … when you undertake a quest and go through The Gate, you will see the button displayed at the top of the HUD. On a PC, hovering over this will show a tooltip with a quick description of your goal. Tapping it will display more detailed information.