Create a Great Job Description

The employment cycle involves an organization determining its employment needs in line with its business strategy.

Once employment needs are established, it’s time to hire staff. Once staff are employed, steps need to be taken to ensure employees are satisfied and productive. The final phase of the cycle is managing what happens when employees leave the organization.

These three phases of the employment cycle are summarized in the following diagram.

1) The Establishment Phase involves the following:

• human resource planning related to business strategy
• job analysis and job design
• recruitment and selection
• employment arrangements (such as part-time, full-time), remuneration, agreements, and contracts

Let’s look at some of the activities during this phase in more detail.

• Planning: identifying staffing needs, conducting job analysis(determining the exact nature of the position to be filled) and job design (determining how the job is to be performed and the material and equipment required to do the job).

• Recruitment: attracting people to apply for the position in the business, undertaking internal and external recruitment.

• Selection: choosing and hiring the most qualified; testing and interviewing.

• Employment arrangements and remuneration: deciding on the type of employment contract (arrangements) and ways of paying employees (remuneration).

Human Resource Planning

Human resource (HR) planning in the establishment phase of the employment cycle involves forecasting the number of employees available and the number of qualified employees demanded in the
 future. It must be related
 to business strategies.

• It is the development of strategies to meet an organization’s future human resource needs.

• Planning for future personnel needs, taking into account both internal activities and factors in the external environment.

Need for Human Resource Planning

All organizations have to plan for the positions that inevitably become vacant. Employees retire, resign or get promoted.

Also, new positions develop as the business expands. Therefore, for most organizations, determining staffing needs is an ongoing process.

Human resource requires that an organization constantly monitor and plan:

• the number of employees required
.
• their qualifications, including skills, previous experience, and knowledge
.
• when and where these employees will be needed.

Job analysis is the next step in determining an organization’s HR needs. There is no sense in hiring people unless the organization is clear about what it is hiring them to do.

In other words, the organization must determine the exact nature of a job before it can recruit the right person to do it.

What is Job Analysis?

Job Analysis is a systematic study of an employee’s duties, tasks and work environment.

It examines:
• actual job activities
• the equipment used on the job
• specific job behaviors required
• working conditions
• the degree of supervision necessary

The job analysis for a particular position typically consists of two parts:

1) Job Description: a written statement describing the employee’s duties, tasks, and responsibilities associated with the job
.

2) Job Specification: a list of the key qualifications needed to perform a particular job in terms of education, skills, and experience.

While job analysis concentrates on the work required for a job to be completed, job design details the number, kind and variety of tasks that individual employees perform in their jobs.

Good job design takes into consideration the satisfaction of the employee’s needs. Jobs may be designed so they include a variety of tasks to keep employees interested and motivated.

Job Design for Motivation

In the past, job specialization — where production was broken down into distinct tasks that were performed by individual employees — often resulted in employee boredom and dissatisfaction.

To counter this effect, three job design approaches have been used based on intrinsic rewards — the good feeling that one gets from doing something well.

Job Design Approaches 

1) Job Rotation
Employees switch, for a period of time, from one job to another. This provides variety and gives employees a more comprehensive view of the organization or the production process.

2) Job Enlargement
Employees are given more things to do within the same job. This provides job variety and a greater challenge for employees.

3) Job Enrichment
Employees are given more control and independence over how they do their work.

Job Design and Satisfaction

Jobs that are designed so that they include a variety of tasks and give the employee some decision-making responsibility are more likely to lead to greater job satisfaction.

Greater job satisfaction in turn may result in lower employee turnover.

Working in teams is another way of improving employee satisfaction. In autonomous work teams, the team decides how and what work will be carried out among its members (without direct supervision).

Crafting a compelling job description is essential to helping you attract the most qualified candidates for your job. With so many jobs listed on job portals, a great job description can help your job stand out from the rest.

The key to writing effective job descriptions is to find the perfect balance between providing enough detail so candidates understand the role and your company while keeping your description concise.

Importance of a Job Description

The job description is a critical document for every position. A good job description performs a number of important functions:

• It describes the skills and competencies that are needed to perform the role.
• It defines where the job fits within the overall company hierarchy.
• It is used as the basis for the employment contract.
• It is a valuable performance management tool.

1) Job Title

The first fundamental element of the job description is the job title. A good job title will have the following qualities:

• It accurately reflects the nature of the job and the duties being performed.
• It is free of gender or age implications.
• It is generic enough that it can be compared to similar jobs in the industry for the purposes of equity in pay and conditions.
• It is self-explanatory for recruitment purposes (in most online job searches, the job title is the main keyword searched).

2) Duties & Responsibilities 

• The job description should contain a list of the duties associated with the role, along with the amount of time expected to be dedicated to each task.

• This should be represented as a percentage (i.e. filing 20%, data entry 40% etc). Descriptions of duties should be no more than two or three sentences in length and should be outcome-based, containing an action, an object and a purpose (eg. ‘compiles monthly reports to allow monitoring of the department’s budget’).

• Roles in smaller companies may have more tasks associated with them but you should still aim to keep your list to around fifteen tasks or preferably less.

5) Salary

Rather than assigning a particular salary to the position, work out a salary range to include in the job description that is competitive with similar positions in other organizations and allows for variations in education and previous experience.

Obviously, this would need to be updated from time to time, in line with changing pay scales.