Job Analysis Importance

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Table of Contents

Three Elements of Job Analysis
Significance to the Hiring and Employee Development Aspects of HRM
Importance of PAQ
Challenges of Designing Job Efficiency for Customer Service
Redesigning Customer Service Job Using PAQ
Fleishman Job Analysis System
Challenges of Redesigning Customer Care Job
Possible Suggestions in Redesigning the Job
How HRM Can Use Information Obtained from Job Analysis
References

Job analysis refers to the process of gathering all the relevant information pertaining a given job specification. It involves evaluation of data on the overall job content and the required personal attributes necessary for the successful execution of such duties.

Three Elements of Job Analysis

Job analysis comprises of three major elements; sources of data, data collection and data analysis. The initial stage of job analysis demands that the recruiting or hiring personnel identifies sources of data relevant to the job at stake.

These sources may include; the current manager of the proposed position for which hiring is being done, workforce plans and even staff members who had previously held the same position.

External data sources include managers who employ similar positions as well as staff members from other organizations with similar positions like the one in question (Hartley, 2001).

Data collection involves the actual process of gathering information related to the position. During this process, information that provides solutions to issues such as the objectives of the job, the physical location of the job and the current trends in the job market are considered.

Sometimes, the hierarchical position of the job must also be given much weight.

The final element of job analysis is the evaluation of the information collected where the gathered information is grouped into functional areas. Irrelevant and wasteful information is also discarded during this phase.

The functional area tasks are then simplified to eliminate unnecessary complexity and arranged in order of importance.

Significance to the Hiring and Employee Development Aspects of HRM

Job analysis is an important aspect in hiring and employee development. For instance, the information obtained during job analysis may be subsequently used in clearly defining the responsibilities of a given job position.

The information is also considered during the recruitment and selection of new employees as well as training of newly recruited members depending on their performance standards.

Lastly, information gathered during job analysis is crucial in developing salary and remuneration programs for the employees. It may also be used in job redesign to enhance efficiency in production (Hartley, 2001).

Importance of PAQ

Position analysis and questionnaire is a widely used information collection technique in employee selection and recruitment. Specific objective oriented questionnaires are designed and administered to prospective incumbent employees prior to an oral interview.

Position analysis and questionnaire is particularly important because it saves time as it limits the extent and range of response from the respondent. Some people are naturally talkative and might consequently be tempted to do the same during oral interviews.

Thus, this method limits them to specific relevant responses hence cutting down on the overall time spent as well as tendencies to give too much information which is irrelevant (Ulrich, 2006).

PAQ is also important as it helps the employer to ascertain the personal attributes and performance trends of the prospective employee.

This happens where the employer needs some performance experience and thus goes ahead to design a questionnaire that will help solicit for information from previous appointments.

The employer may also make the incumbent employee reveal reasons for resignation from previous appointments. Thus, the employer is able to evaluate whether the same person was dropped from the position or is moving out on other beneficial grounds.

Another importance of this technique is that it helps in benchmarking of an organization’s overall performance.

In the design of the questionnaires, most employers tend to gather information on how business is carried out in other organizations of the same type; more so from their competitors.

This helps the recruiting organization to gauge its current performance in comparison to its competitors and make necessary adjustments in order to compete favourably.

Challenges of Designing Job Efficiency for Customer Service

Customer service job requires strong interpersonal skills and results from position analysis and questionnaire will thus be of great importance in redesigning of such a job to enhance efficiency and overall improvement in performance.

One such way that human resource personnel will use this information is to evaluate the daily work load of each customer care employee.

These cases may include scenarios where the employee has to answer phone calls and physically respond to customers and in most cases exhaustion may lead to boredom.

In the case of customer care attendants, such instances may result in mistreating or acting hostile towards the customers.

The human resource manager may opt to redesign the job in a way that another employee be taken to handle phone calls while the former be retained to deal with physical responses to clients.

This will reduce the workload and exhaustion. Introduction of another employee in the room will also provide company and reduce boredom hence improve output (Ulrich, 2006).

Redesigning Customer Service Job Using PAQ

Human resource personnel may also use the information from position and questionnaire to redesign a customer care job in such way that the employees work in daily shifts instead of having a single employee work the whole day.

This can be more efficient compared to scenarios where a single employee works for a given period of time say a week before he or she hand over duties to another. Working half day ensures higher concentration levels and employees are bound to work better.

This information may only be obtained when the questionnaire is designed to allow the respondent to select amongst several job plans which is best suited to him. Most of them will go for a plan that allows them to work half a day.

Fleishman Job Analysis System

There are several strategies of employee selection as proposed by the Fleishman Job Analysis System. One such strategy is through outsourcing. Here, the human resource department contracts a hiring firm in order to get the best suited candidate for the required position.

The hiring firm then advertises, recruits candidates and conducts interviews. The firm then selects the most qualified candidates in line with the organization’s requirements and presents them to the organization for staffing and training.

The second strategy of employee selection is through evaluation of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA). In this strategy, the human resource department evaluates each job and designs the required knowledge, skills and abilities required for a given job.

The department also decides on the best way to assess candidates that possess such skills as enlisted for the job. Afterwards, the human resource department then embarks on processing the applicants on the basis of those assessment tools (Fine & Cronshaw, 2009).

Challenges of Redesigning Customer Care Job

The main challenge of redesigning a customer care job is the tendency to increase the number of employees hence an increase on the wage bill. In most cases, efficient customer care service demands that the attendant is neither bored nor exhausted.

In order to achieve this, it may be necessary to have many attendants to work in shifts. This may result into financial pressures in meeting their wages and salaries. A company that sells items by catalogue receives such catalogues for different products.

Another possible challenge would be managing a large number of people in one department.

It is necessary that the company has several groups of people under the customer care section dealing with catalogues for different items especially when the overall population of the customer care employees is large.

Possible Suggestions in Redesigning the Job

Some possible strategies to redesign the job involve having sub departmental heads dealing with different product catalogues. Each sub department head will have a number of employees dealing with specific product catalogues under him or her in a different room.

This employee will then report to the overall department head hence making supervision of the customer care efficient. In this way, the problem associated with managing large employee groups will be solved.

Another approach to redesigning such a job would be by offering workload related perks and incentives. This can be done by having employees work in shifts or by having employees work interchangeably as temporal sub department heads.

This works to improve the general employee morale thus high and quality output (Fine & Cronshaw, 2009).

How HRM Can Use Information Obtained from Job Analysis

A human resource manager can use the information from position analysis and questionnaire to measure resource performance through the following three ways.

The first is by analysing the employee employment history since it is possible to rate the resource performance basing on the performance in their earlier commitments.

The second way is by evaluating personal skills as presented by the respondent. Every job responsibility has certain knowledge and skills required. Thus, it is possible to ascertain the performance of the resource by evaluating his/her skills as given in the questionnaire.

The third approach is through analysing the remuneration estimates of the employee as most non-performing employees will quote relatively low salaries in order to win the employer.

References

Fine, S., & Cronshaw, S. (2009). Functional job analysis: A foundation for human resources Management, New Jersey, NY: Erlbaum.

Hartley, D. (2001). Job analysis at the speed of reality, Amherst, MA: HRD Press.

Ulrich, D. (2006). Human Resource Champions, The next agenda for adding value and delivering results. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

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