When internal company stakeholders (the managers and higher-up types) are advised to conduct a formal job analysis for a position, the response is often, “Why? Why do I have to do all that work –or even worse, hire someone else to do it? I know what the job entails. Our managers are knowledgeable. Our high performers are obvious. Why do I need to develop a physical (or electronic) survey, devise a solid distribution plan, and do statistical analysis on the outcomes? This isn’t exactly brain surgery.” If these responses sound familiar to you, it shouldn’t be hard to envision the following scenario. Let’s say you work at a relatively small company with customer service agents who have to field calls about their accounts, billing, etc. You have been asked to create a position description for the service agent role -- the guts of which will be used in an advertisement to attract the most desirable job seekers by accurately describing what the job involves -- and what type of person (experience, skills, talents, etc) your company is looking for.
In theory, finding out exactly what the job involves should be easy: you talk to those who currently hold the job, and you talk to their managers. You have them fill out a 1- to 2-page form, and you use that to write the PD. These conversations and/or internal surveys will (allegedly) cover three key areas: the essential tasks the position is expected to accomplish, the knowledge and skills they will need to accomplish these tasks successfully, and the work environment. Sounds simple enough, right?
Wrong. Most organizations are decent at zeroing in on the first and third essential parts of a description. What many companies fail at is the second thing listed above: figuring out what knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) are required to be successful at the job.
Why do they fail? Because, instead of doing a genuine review of each position to be filled, the responsible parties (i.e., you) have a few internal conversations about the job. To put it bluntly, these conversations often aren’t good enough. And if you stop there, you’ve blown it.
All too often, you end up talking to people who have all been working the same types of jobs in your company for so long they can’t see the forest for the trees anymore. These employees are valuable contributors, but they are no longer capable of achieving the distance to properly and accurately evaluate how the job in question operates today. In other words, they have been ‘institutionalized’ to the point of ‘groupthink.’ And to top it off, you aren’t writing enough down. There’s no agreed-upon formal framework for your questions, or to evaluate the responses you get.
And even if you have the foresight (and your bosses miraculously afford you the time) to try to dodge the groupthink by actually creating some kind of survey and disseminating it to incumbents and managers, you still might not get the results you need. This is because internal surveys are often looked upon with suspicion. “Who will see this survey? Will my boss know that I filled it out? Will he/she know that I didn’t fill it out? What if the company doesn’t like my responses? Will my answers be held against me? I’ll just fill it out and tell them what I think they want me to say about my job…but if I do that, am I putting my job in jeopardy by cooperating with them? Maybe I shouldn’t fill it out at all.”
The outcome? You get crap info/crap data. Crap data equals a crappy job analysis. Consequently, everything your company tries to build on the basis of your informal job analysis will be built on a foundation of sand.
A solid job analysis can be put to a variety of uses: effective job postings, determining accurate compensation, developing tools (like tests and structured interviews) for selection and/or promotion, evaluating performance, and more. If your job analysis is flawed, you will end up failing to identify the right people for the job. You won’t compensate them accurately. You’ll choose the wrong tests and assessment tools to choose the wrong people for the job. Those people will perform below expectations, and will either leave or be fired.
A sound job analysis is at the core of every successful talent development practice you’ve ever seen. If you get the job analysis right, any recruitment/talent development/talent management mistakes beyond that point can be corrected. If you get it wrong, nothing that follows it will work.
That’s why you need to complete a real job analysis.
If you are afraid you might have to hire people to make sure you get it done right, then for Pete’s sake hire consultants! When you do, there are certain steps and practices that will provide an indication that your vendors know what they are doing.
Many consultants and online sources will allude to the best practices of job analysis in order to get you to hire them. Others will do so perhaps to boost the perceived value of those with industry expertise. Renegade Psychology takes a different tack: we’ll share what a good job analysis process looks like. In the process, you might learn enough to perform one on your own at ‘professional gunpoint’…a predicament that HR professionals and hiring managers find themselves facing with unfortunate frequency.
Read on to learn how to conduct a real job analysis.