How to conduct a job analysis

How to conduct a job analysis

Before we get into the how, what, who, and why of the job analysis process, let's start with a few basics.

What is a job analysis?

In plain terms, it's a deep dive into every part of the job. It includes all the data relating to what it takes to do the job, how the job is performed, the benefits, tasks, and its relation to other posts and roles within the company and the industry.

The importance of job analysis in a structured business soon becomes apparent when you understand what it provides. It defines vital data throughout key areas:

• Knowledge, skills, and abilities required to carry out the job
• Activities, duties, responsibilities, and critical tasks
• Working conditions
• Interactions and communication with other departments, offices, partners, and clients
• How the role relates to the organization structure
• Performance standards
• Budget
• Machinery and equipment utilized
• Supervision—delivered and received
• Training and development
• Promotions and in-house appointment
• Recruitment and selection
• Expected outcomes
• Compensation administration
• Risk management, security, and health and safety

Who should conduct a job analysis?

Typically, HR handles most job analyses, but there are occasions when a specialist consultant is employed to conduct the work.

The benefit of hiring a consultant is their ability to focus on a specific task.

Your HR team, or an employee currently in the role, will already have their typical workload to carry out. Squeezing in another task may mean they give less than their full attention to the matter at hand, resulting in a much weaker end-product.

If there are several jobs to analyze, hiring a consultant provides consistency across roles and promotes greater efficiency in the process.

What is the purpose of job analysis?

Apart from creating a succinct job description for recruitment, promotion, and selection processes, the job analysis aims to document the company's structure.

These deep-dive documents show how the roles within an organization connect to deliver its objectives. They also create an all-in instruction guide for the HR department and anyone else who needs the same documentation.

Here are some of the prime job analysis benefits:

Job design

Not only will an accurate analysis help deliver the most inclusive job description, but it also helps team managers and analysts refine roles and details. This helps boost performance within each department and the overall operation of the company.

Recruitment and selection

The analysis provides a clear understanding of the type of person required for the job. It highlights the education, qualifications, experience, and skills required from ideal candidates. It also defines rewards, salary, conditions, prospects, daily process, and role expectations. Combining both of these data sets provides the information needed for clear design and presentation of advertising and marketing to fill those posts.

Training and development

Understanding the role's current operation strengths and weaknesses indicates areas where training or further development is required.

Compensation management

A well-defined compensation policy makes delivering essential information to candidates far simpler and creating enticing marketing materials. Elements including pay scales, bonuses, incentives, promotions, and restructuring opportunities—all of which add to the attractiveness of a position.

These elements not only help attract new talent but also retain and motivate existing employees.

Optimizing performance reviews

This works in both directions. Developing each job analysis highlights the objectives and the performance of current employees.

Periodic performance reviews consider the elements that make up your job analysis, showing whether your team meets goals and expected outcomes, whether they're realistic, and whether they need updating or redesigning.

The key job analysis methods

• Interviews
• Observations
• Questionnaires
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These are the primary tools for job analysis. Each method has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages. Hopefully, by combining the data from each element, patterns you can trust should emerge, and the data gathered will provide an accurate outline for the ideal analysis.

Job analysis interviews

Interviews need to be conducted with team members who understand the role better than anyone else. This includes the employees currently carrying out those tasks and their managers.

More often than not, the HR team and company executives don't have the same idea of what's involved in the job on a daily basis, nor of the typical problems and issues that require regular attention on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

When interviewing your key players, it's vital to maintain a structured, systematic approach, to retain accuracy, continuity, and clean data.

• Ask all interviewees the same questions in the same order.
• Record all of your answers to compare and evaluate against existing or expected data.
• Implement a standard interview structure for interviewers to follow.
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A poor structure allows conversations to go off-topic, making it harder to recognize and compare data. Each question must be designed to uncover specific data. Without sticking to a rigid structure, it can be almost impossible to spot the necessary patterns required to identify the factors that will define your analysis.

Job analysis observation

Observation provides an opportunity to reveal factors that an interview may miss. It gives the analyst first-hand information on the existing operation.

It's a great way to identify elements that employees may try to hide, or that they're embarrassed or unsure about mentioning.

While it offers the analyst a more hands-on understanding of the role, it also has some disadvantages.

• Employees may work more efficiently or differently under observation, which can affect the accuracy of the data.
• Not all typical duties will occur within a specifically allocated timeframe.
• Executive and managerial roles are often far more challenging to monitor and observe.

Job analysis questionnaires

Questionnaires help to fill the gaps between interviews and observations.

They're also applicable to a range of staff throughout the company: employees, supervisors, managers, and more.

A questionnaire provides a simple, time-friendly, and economical way to gather information across various departments.

Your questionnaires' design can include checklists, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions, whichever methods are easiest for those filling out the answers, and offer the easiest ways to compile their data.

It also gives employees the option to provide more honest information without having to face an interviewer. On the other hand, written responses can be confusing and open to misinterpretation.

What to include in a job analysis questionnaire & interview

Review the responsibilities of your current employees

Finding out precisely what duties your employees currently carry out is imperative to determine whether they match what's expected, are previously documented, or have drifted away from target actions and goals.

Although HR and management deliver hopeful outputs and expectations, they might not know what the role entails day to day.

Creating a detailed analysis means understanding the job on every level. Each action needs to be detailed accurately to provide the best instructions to new applicants and to ensure they understand precisely what's expected of them.

Carrying out research into other businesses and organizations with the same or similar job roles

It's not entirely unacceptable to cite an example of a job analysis from competitors or another organization in the same industry.

It's vital to create a bespoke analysis for your operation, yet looking into how others produce theirs often introduces areas you may not have considered.

Copying somebody else's work is lazy and not a good way to achieve your best results, but using them as a guide or reference can provide additional inspiration.

Analyzing daily duties, tasks, and responsibilities of the role.

As you look into each job and duty, you may find areas where overlapping roles create inefficiencies, or where moving functions to different departments better equipped for the purpose would be more efficient.

Are there tasks and responsibilities assigned to more appropriate employees or departments to ease pressure and improve efficiency?

Combining industry information from other data points

There are plenty of statistics and data available for the most popular and accepted industries. Using them can guide where you're pitched on salaries, benefits, conditions, and alternative roles. Not only will they guide you into areas of improvement, but they can also help you prevent staff from leaving for more advantageous opportunities.

Determine the critical outcomes and contributions required for and by the role

Sometimes we can't see the wood for the trees. When putting together a job analysis, analysts can become so involved in the process that they miss the true point or become sidetracked from what they're trying to achieve.

Creating a clear, concise document—fit for purpose—is a necessity. Test your documents with those who do and don't understand the role.

You can ask those directly connected to the job if it's clear and if any vital areas or points are missing.

And then ask team members who aren't experienced with the role whether the document provides a complete and clear understanding of what's involved and any areas they feel are missing or aren't easy to understand.

Conclusion

A great job analysis takes plenty of planning, structure, and organization.

The rewards, however, are many. They're vital for all departments and newcomers to understand the company's complete strategy and model. They also create significant potential to attract fresh talent and the very best players in your business.

Having the right tools for the job, understanding what data you need, and knowing how to get it are imperative for creating the most coherent, streamlined, and systemized job analysis documents available—for everyone.